I think taking on a vocation as a poet means living in the gaps.  If
you're too young to understand the implications when you first make a
choice to write poetry seriously, well, that's the curse; because by
the time you're old enough to understand, it's too late to go back.
You just have to make the best of a bad job ("downfallen like a mule
in a well / like a true poet" Pound says, or something like it,
somewhere in the Cantos).  I have sometimes thought that I only write
poetry because I am searching for the Real Poem which will mean that
I never have write another one, which suggests a certain amount of
agon in my relationship to it - poetry has been the determining
structure of my life, even more than decisions like having children,
and perhaps somewhere I would like to be released from it.  (Released
from what? I don't know... this compulsion, this pleasure, this pain,
this prison, this delight, this freedom: all of which become synonyms
in this context).  I am often happier when I am not writing poems;
that is, until there is a poem which needs to be written, in which
case not writing it, or not being able to write it, is a kind of
torment, and working on the poem makes me happier than anything else.
I think about Ibsen's scorpion, or Ionesco's characterisation of
writing as a "mental necessity".

All these pressures, which are for me the real business of poems,
have very little to do with the business of money and publicity and
Literature.  I'm not at all sure that they have anything to do with
it, in fact: except that those practicalities, as I see it, may or
may not facilitate the writing.  It's not my business whether someone
likes or approves of my poetics or my poems.  I can't do anything
about that.  I write poems primarily to exercise or exorcise some
thing or cluster of things within my own psyche.  For me it's a
necessity; that doesn't mean it has to be a necessity for anyone
else.  And for me, my whole life has been about arranging
practicalities so that poetry is possible within it.  As I said in an
earlier post, there are any number of possible strategies.  I get
troubled when the strategies seem to become more important (to the
poet - what other people make of them is not so important) than the
reason for them.  This seems to be the case as much in the
resentments about how poets make their livings, if they do so as
professional writers, as in the problematics within, say, funding
structures themselves.  There is no reason why my poetry should
matter to anyone else, and certainly no reason why it should matter
more than things like hospitals.  There are no "shoulds" about poetry
at all.  What counts to me is that it matters to _me_.   And if
someone will give me money which enables the writing of it, then I
will take it.  It profits a poet little if she wins a kingdom and
loses her soul, but it profits her just as little to fritter away her
soul in resentment and envy.  There seems to me a self serving
aggrandisement and naivety in the stances which state that a poet
_should not_ live as a professional writer, that the only poets worth
their salt are above such questions.  I challenge such statements;
but I would never say that a poet _should_ live as a professional
writer either.   These questions are ultimately all about inner moral
ecologies, and therefore infinitely various, and subtler than can be
said here: and the most crucial questions aren't actually about money
at all.

Best

A
--


Alison Croggon

Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/

Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/