When I was eighteen or nineteen, I romanticized the poverty of the artist’s life. I couldn’t picture myself doing anything useful with my life and I dropped out of community college after a couple years of wavering. My father urged me to consider the example of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Poets can have respectable careers, he urged. But I wouldn’t listen.
It can be difficult to shoehorn the passionate intensity of a young human into the promise of a side project. I wanted to live in Paris in the 1930s or New York City in the 1960s. Instead, I moved to Portland, Oregon where a series of entry level jobs slowly sucked the life out of me.
There is a bit of nuance in the fact that part of the reason I did not pursue college at the time was that my family could not afford to send me. I came from a middle class home but they told me at one point that I would have to take out student loans to fund my own education. And so there was an element of pragmatism in my acceptance of retail and food service jobs. Perhaps there was an intergenerational form of risk aversion that retrospectively reconfigures itself as creative passion. But it proved to be spiritually exhausting over time.
At one point, I lived in Chicago and I did not have medical or dental insurance. I had to have several infected wisdom teeth extracted and had to rely on help from family and my employer because I could not afford the procedures. One day when I had a fever, I was sitting in an urgent care clinic crowded with working families and unhoused people, waiting for hours to be seen by a nurse who could prescribe antibiotics. I remember wondering whether this was the artist’s life that I had romanticized.
I was never truly hungry or at risk during these years of minimum wage jobs but there’s a painful contradiction in the fact that in trying to escape capitalism, one becomes even more enslaved to it. I was the pawn of petty middle managers, greedy landlords, and bad luck. At one point in my late twenties, my car broke down and it would have taken most of my savings to fix it. Instead, I donated the car to charity and went back to school. I was finally ready to take out a student loan and try to figure something out.
What did I have to show for myself after my bohemian years? An unreadable surrealist novel, a handful of poems written on a typewriter, some melancholy paintings... None of it had lived up to the examples of Dylan Thomas, Franz Kafka, or Vincent Van Gogh. Did going back to college mean I was giving up on being a writer? Living in the unpublished twilight of amateur creative pursuits, I had to ask myself over and over whether I was done with making poems and stories. Did maturity mean giving up one’s artistic ambitions?
Poetry has always been incommensurate with market economies. There’s something poignant about the fact that even the most famous poets have never made much money on their work, though many of them maintained professional careers. My father’s examples – a banker, an insurance executive, a doctor. These are not poetic vocations but it is a testament to the human condition that we construct meaning even amidst our compromises and complicities.
Has there ever been a historical period in which poets could be said to be making a good living for themselves on poetry alone? A small percentage of poets seem to manage to make some small amounts of money here and there. Speaking fees and university appointments are what keep most professional poets slightly above the line of precarity these days. I admire many of them but for me, poetry feels like something that means more as a kind of remainder than as a primary mode of making one’s living. It’s an excess that refuses to accommodate our utilitarian existence.
In the end, I don’t think my youthful romanticism was entirely misguided, though it was naive. These days, I work on my poetry and fiction with a sense of gratitude and openness. I am resigned to the fact that writing will probably never be a career for me. And still I derive joy from art’s strange resilience in the face of a world that holds it in such low esteem.