What do poets do

A s yet another National Poetry Month winds down, I find myself asking the same question:. Poetry may be the single art form that won't make you rich. Some actors get rich Robert Downey Jr. Even painters can rack up a big payday, though it usually helps if they're dead. But write a poem on it, and it's worthless. Like many poets today, Perelman, 68, made his living from teaching. The Ohio-born writer recently retired from the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught literature for 25 years.

Few poets actually make a living from writing itself, said poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis, who teaches at Temple University. Once upon a time, poets were subsidized by wealthy patrons, said poet Jane Hedley, who teaches at Bryn Mawr. How do you balance competing priorities?

What effect does constant multi-tasking have on your writing? The whole poetry scene is run on generosity, and I must get a couple of requests a week to do something unpaid — a blurb, an introduction, a reading, a poem for an anthology. As a child in Bolton, I used to dream of meeting other writers.

I still get starstruck. And the worst? Oh, just the money I suppose. Every year it seems fees go down and more people expect you to do more for free. And I get good perks: festival tickets, free books…. What beliefs do you think people have about poets and are they true?

Oscar Wilde wrote, "The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. Short story writer Lorrie Moore wrote, "First, try to be something, anything, else," in her short story "How to Become a Writer. But she has also kept writing. A condensed, edited version of that email conversation follows. When did you first consider yourself a "poet," and what was your job at the time?

Can you use it in a sentence? For example, at Iowa, we were often called poets but only really to distinguish us from the fiction writers, viz. Charles is someone who came to mean a great deal to me and still does. And when he wrote out my name, mid-list or so, it was one of those rare occasions when you know something will stay with you forever.

It was a great crew, many of whom went on to join the crew I was lucky to be among at Iowa. Tell me about some of the jobs you've held while writing poems between that time and today. Oh, lord. Greater recognition could be parlayed into a career. One easy marriage in poetry is that of poet and academic. Many well-recognized poets teach in language departments and they may especially focus on the teaching of how to write and analyze poetry.

Lots of people are good poets without having to be taught. Education can range from secondary to post-secondary work, which may not at all be in the subject of learning how to write poems, but could have been gained in many other ways. As mentioned, a few poets, especially those coming from impoverished backgrounds, may not have very much education at all, but they might gain notice because their words speak in a particularly poignant or gritty way to the state of the world.