A PS to this: for non-Brits the abbreviation DSS stands for the Department
of Social Security, now called, I believe, the Department of Work and
Pensions, but it's still commonly referred to under the old moniker.

While an adaptation of Descartes via Monty Python has struck me:

'I think therefore I drink'.

Best

Dave


David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "david.bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2003 5:14 PM
Subject: Re: Arts funding was Re: tRace Vacancies


Gerald,

a noviate Dominican priest I know told me this joke this afternoon:

Q. 'Where's the place for funding poets?'

Ans. 'It's over the road, they pay you once a fortnight, it's called the
DSS.'

He also gave me a variation on Descartes: 'Cogito ergo ignoramus sum'.

Best

Dave


David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerald England" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2003 8:57 AM
Subject: Re: Arts funding was Re: tRace Vacancies


My gravy-train image may have been a bit OTT

but your post does prove what I've long thought
i.e.

Being in an arts-admin job or teaching position
has got ***** all to do with being a writer, especially a writer of poetry.

Even, as in your case, when your job was teaching poetry
Actually writing poetry was NOT a job.

According to an old newspaper article on me, I
"failed my exams at University because I spent my time
walking in the parks writing poetry"

This was a Sheffield newspaper who'd got hold of me
after I'd done an article about vanity-presses,
The reporter asked me when I first started writing poetry
and I told him -- when I went to University in Glasgow
he asked what I liked about Glasgow
and I said that I liked the city parks.
Failing my exams was more a case of
having chosen the wrong course [Food Science
rather than Maths or Chemistry]
and nothing to do with my discovery of poetry
but to a journalist
2 + 2 = 5

Yes indeed poetry costs the writer
as I am sure all on the list will attest
whatever day job they take to finance it.

Someone talked about
the idea that poetry was divorced from the real world of work
as being a romantic notion.

The romantic notion is that
being involved with arts-adminstration or teaching
has anything to do with being an artist/poet.

yours
Gerald