Poets and Jobs, by John Foy

All jobs seem real to the people who have them, but poets like to make distinctions. They refer typically to “real” jobs when talking about employment outside of academia (illogical though that may be). I’m a poet, and I’ve been told that I have a real job. I work as a senior financial editor at a Brazilian investment bank. Despite an urge early on to enter the teaching profession, for which I had some talent, I went down another road. I had to support my family in Manhattan. By the year 2000, my black beret and cape were gone, but the calling was still with me, so there was nothing for it but to change my way of thinking about the literary life. Over the years, through friendships with many poets and writers, I’d come to see that the only thing that mattered in a so-called literary life was generating literature, and in this case, writing poems. No surprise, then, that I’ve been fiercely interested in major poets who lived “unliterary” lives. We all know the usual suspects.

Wallace Stevens was trained as a lawyer and spent most of his working life as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. The guy won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955, and he was offered a position at Harvard, but he turned it down. He chose to stay at his job. He liked being a vice president. He was often seen walking along the leafy suburban streets of Hartford in a suit, mumbling to himself. We know what he was doing.

In 1917, when he was 29, T. S. Eliot signed on with Lloyd's Bank in London as a clerk in the Colonial and Foreign department. He would stay for eight years. The writer Lisa Levy, in her article called “A Peaceful, but Very Interesting Pursuit” (The Rumpus, January 31, 2012), notes that Eliot thought himself very fortunate to have found this job, and she quotes from a letter he wrote to his mother in 1917:

“I am now earning £2 10s a week for sitting in an office from 9:15 to 5 with an hour for lunch, and tea served in the office… Perhaps it will surprise you to hear that I enjoy the work. It is not nearly so fatiguing as schoolteaching, and is more interesting. I have a desk and a filing cabinet in a small room with another man. The filing cabinet is my province, for it contains balance sheets of all the foreign banks with which Lloyd’s does business. These balances I file and tabulate in such a way as to show the progress or decline of every bank from year to year.”

It’s both riveting and appalling to hear Eliot speak with such affection about his filing cabinet. Yet in the midst of such a life he conceived The Waste Land, which was published in 1922. Eliot didn’t leave the bank until 1925, when he went to join the publishing house Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber). Granted, this new job was all rather literary, but it was also corporate, and he became a director and went about, happily, in a three-piece suit.

There are other examples. The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda labored as a diplomat. Philip Larkin worked for 30 years as a librarian at the University of Hull. During these years—more deprivation, perhaps, than daffodils—he wrote most of his glum, bilious and brilliant poems. William Carlos Williams, a doctor, delivered 3,000 babies in the grimy industrial zones of New Jersey. Are there other major poets who’ve delivered even 30 babies? Or 3? If so, I would  like to know. We’re talking 3,000 here. I verified this arresting fact with Herbert Leibowitz, whose masterful biography of William Carlos Williams, Something Urgent I Have to Say, was published by FSG in 2011.

Then there is the louche and sublime C. P. Cavafy. In 1892, at the age of 29, he took a job as a low-level clerk in the Irrigation Department of the Ministry of Public Works in Egypt. He would stay for 30 years! According to the Official Website of the Cavafy Archive, when he “was finally able to gain employment… at the Ministry of Public Works, he was hired as a temporary clerk, since his Greek citizenship excluded him from any permanent position. Being an assiduous and conscientious worker, Cavafy managed to hold this temporary position (renewed annually) for thirty years. He was always mindful of his finances, both out of necessity and out of vanity… He started working at the Alexandrian Stock Exchanges early on, and was a registered broker from 1894 to 1902.”

The most “poetic” side of Cavafy’s life—aside from his poems—were his wanderings about the streets of Alexandria after he left the office. We know what he was doing.

I’d like to conclude with James Merrill’s affectionate and counterintuitive thoughts on dear Elizabeth Bishop, who for most of her life never had any job at all, real or otherwise. The quotation below comes directly from the famous Paris Review interview that Sandy McClatchy conducted with James Merrill (Summer 1982, Issue No. 84). This is Merrill speaking:

“Oh, I suppose I’ve learned things about writing, technical things, from each of them [Stevens, Auden, Bishop, a few others]. Auden’s penultimate rhyming, Elizabeth’s way of contradicting something she’s just said, Stevens’s odd glamorizing of philosophical terms. Aside from all that, what I think I really wanted was some evidence that one didn’t have to lead a “literary” life—belong to a ghetto of “creativity.” That one could live as one pleased, and not be shamefaced in the glare of renown (if it ever came) at being an insurance man or a woman who’d moved to Brazil and played samba records instead of discussing X’s latest volume. It was heartening that the best poets had this freedom. Auden did lead a life that looked literary from a distance, though actually I thought it was more a re-creation of school and university days: much instruction, much giggling, much untidiness. Perhaps because my own school years were unhappy for extracurricular reasons I didn’t feel completely at ease with all that… It was du côté de chez Elizabeth, though, that I saw the daily life that took my fancy even more, with its kind of random, Chekhovian surface, open to trivia and funny surprises, or even painful ones, today a fit of weeping, tomorrow a picnic. I could see how close that life was to her poems, how much the life and the poems gave to one another. I don’t mean I’ve “achieved” anything of the sort in my life or poems, only that Elizabeth had more of a talent for life—and for poetry—than anyone else I’ve known, and this has served me as an ideal.”

I sign off today on that happy note. 

Comments

[David Yezzi]

Great post, John!

[W.F. Lantry]

You know, the more I read of Merrill, the more I like him. Nice article!

[J.D. Smith]

Very well done.

In this age of limited academic opportunities, this is a useful reminder that there are other paths for making a living (as I do).

One hopes more and more MFA and equivalent programs help to prepare students for both employment and writing life outside of academia.

[The Best American Poetry]

Nice work. I would contest only the thought that it is entirely illogical of academics to talk about the "real world" as if they weren't living in it. Among students with serious literary ambitions, too few consider the possibility of making a living outside the graves of academe. We'll let that typo stay for the moment. Back in 1986 I did a piece for Newsweek about "poets who work for a living." You know how, when you give a book to someone, you're expected to write something besides your signature? Most of us flub it, but Bob Creeley wrote the best line when he gave me a copy of his Collected. He wrote, "To David Lehman, who works for a living." I cherish it. -- DL

[Matthew Thorburn]

This is terrific. As a poet who works in the legal/business world (and there are actually a lot of us, I find), I'm fascinated -- and only wish the lawyers I deal with were more like Wallace Stevens!

[John Foy]

Dear David,

Thanks for your message, and thanks for this wonderful opportunity to blog for Best American Poetry.  I've had a blast this week, and I've been getting a lot of readers and a lot of good feedback.

I love "the graves of academe"! If you liked my entry on Poets & Jobs, I'm very honored.  It's a subject close to my heart, given that I've pursued poetry assiduously but worked most of my life outside the walls of the college world, while so many of my poet friends have worked inside. Sometimes, you start to develop a complex! So models like Stevens have always been very helpful to me, very reassuring. There are so many other poets with so-called "real jobs" I could have included.  Maybe I need to expand this into a bigger essay. I understand why you cherish Creeley's inscription, "To David Lehman, who works for a living"! You've done so many things in your professional writing life, and succeeded in so many ways outside of academia, that I believe you must share my views on this.

In my post today, about small animals mistakenly killed by power mowers (see Larkin and Wilbur), I wanted to include my own poem written specifically to address this macabre theme.  It's called "Killing Things."  But it's due to come out later this year in American Arts Quarterly, so I had to avoid "pre-publishing" it.  Perhaps I can send you a copy!

Here is a link to my website: www.johnffoy.net.

With many thanks to you and Stacey,

John

917-282-2862

[email protected]

[Surazeus Simon Seamount]

I have been working 5 years as a cartographer while writing an epic poem about philosophers the past two years.

[Lewis Turco]

I began publishing in the little magazines after high school as a yeoman (clerk) sailing around the world aboard a carrier, the USS Hornet. By the time I attended college I had published more and better than many of my teachers, which annoyed some of them.