I would be interested to know how people's writing lives interact with their economic lives, and what solutions they have found for melding the two.

Rick

Toads

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don’t end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.


Philip Larkin

At this point, Rick, my wife works a lot and I scrimp a lot with what she earns and work as a last resort. In past years, when I did work fulltime, well, I wrote a good deal less. But my work involved all kinds of professional, technical, popular as well as literary writing, which fed into my own writing. Tom

I wish I had the personality and discipline to write as a living.  I think I have the knowledge and the talent, at some level, to do it, but I think finding the resources and venues is not my idea of enjoying life.  So my writing life has nothing to do with my economic life, except for the writing I do at work.  But they don't pay me to write.  They pay me to manage an office, at this point, anyway.

I would think that a person would have to really be talented as a writer in order to just write as they wish and be paid for it, but I do think there are people out there that do it.  Pretty awesome career, I'd say.

Good topic, Rick.  Thanks.

cheryl

Toads Revisited


Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,

Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses -
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn't suit me.

Being one of the men
You meet of an afternoon:
Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,

Waxed-fleshed out-patients
Still vague from accidents,
And characters in long coats
Deep in the litter-baskets -

All dodging the toad work
By being stupid or weak.
Think of being them!
Hearing the hours chime,

Watching the bread delivered,
The sun by clouds covered,
The children going home;
Think of being them,

Turning over their failures
By some bed of lobelias,
Nowhere to go but indoors,
Nor friends but empty chairs -

No, give me my in-tray,
My loaf-haired secretary,
My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.


Philip Larkin

  I get a taste of being at home while wife works during summers.  Do you find it a struggle to keep from drifting on the wave of time rather than writing?

Thanks for the poem, Peter.  Hadn't seen this one.

Rick

You mean you can't make a full time living writing poetry?

Cheryl, even if you had all the necessary qualities to write for a living, writing POETRY for a living would provide its own set of challenges -- namely that most folks -- even avid readers of other forms of writing -- treat poetry like a diseased cow corpse.

Rick

The second one is stronger than the first, Peter, and both are socks-knockers-off.

Rick

seems there are slam poets making in excess of $50 thousand a year with poetry


http://www.poetrycircle.com/index.php/topic,18510.0.html


Instead of having to rely on academia for work, poets can now be full-time, upper-middle class touring artists earning between fifty and a hundred-thousand dollars a year. Surely, this is the beginning of a golden age for performance poetry.

Glad you enjoyed them, Rick.  I've got a couple of his books.  I must keep a look out and treat myself to some more.

Funnily enough, he used to go to the same barber as me

I find that if I'm busy at work I'm too tired to write at home.  I've just changed jobs and now work nights, so I'm hoping to write more.

No, fortunately for my writing, it IS my drifting on the wave of time!

  Cheryl, does office managing ever get into your poems?  Rick