Sheenagh wrote:
>On writing being a proper job (viz Douglas Barbour),
>there's an incident in a Brentano novella where a
>full-time novelist is asked by an old woman what he
>does for a living and finds he's ashamed to say,
>because she won't think it a proper job and neither,
>he realises, does he.
Auden once wrote (in THE POET AND THE CITY, I think) that he said he was a
Medieval Historian when strangers asked him what he did. To say 'poet'
would have embarrassed them both because everyone knows you can't make a
living out of being a poet.
>I can't really see it as one
>either, because it's too much fun; work is what you do
>that you don't enjoy, because you need the money.
But that is surely not the way it should be. We should gain sustenance out
of our work. Teaching is rewarding, as is editing and translating I
believe. I have been a toilet cleaner for the loca Alcohol & Drug
Authority's rehab centre, and I now teach English at uni. I would rather
teach.
>Also
>it seems to me that full-time writers tend to run out
>of material and end up writing about being writers.
Good point. Too many poets now write poems about writing poetry. (Geoff
Page has a rule of thumb that in each collection only one poem can be about
writing. It's a good rule.) A too-literary life can lead to the mind
sitting on its arse and taking the poetry with it.
Andrew
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Andrew Burke Copywriting
[log in to unmask] Creative Writing
http://www.bam.com.au/andrew/ Editing
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