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Feb 04, 2007 at 04:26 PM |
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From Jim Harrison's essay, Don't Feed the Poets, for The New York Times' Book Review on 28 January 2007.
I recently wandered through my
home library in Montana and rediscovered Karl Shapiro’s “Bourgeois
Poet” (1964), a book of prose poems I first read during the vile winter
of 1966. My wife and I had moved back to northern Michigan, after I’d
left behind a good job in Boston on the promise of my first book of
poems, “Plain Song,” having been accepted by Norton. I don’t recall
what shape I expected the promise to arrive in: I ended up trimming
Christmas trees and working construction for two and a half bucks an
hour. Our rented house was only $35 a month, but it was drafty, the
furnace was faulty and frequently the place couldn’t be brought up to
55 degrees. All of these numbers can actually describe a life.
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Dec 09, 2006 at 11:10 PM |
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Why are there so many more writing programs today than there ever were in the past? Are there really more jobs available to writers? Or there just more universities who want to cash in on the hopes of dreamers with a lot of disposable income?
 * Taken from the AWP website. |
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Last Updated ( Dec 10, 2006 at 08:54 AM )
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Feb 04, 2007 at 12:34 PM |
While many writes have chosen to teach to make ends meet, there are many who took different paths:
- Louisa May Alcott - seamstress, domestic helper, governess
- Aphra Behn - spy
- Louis Begley (winner of the 1992 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award) - continues to work as a partner at a law firm
- T.S. Eliot - editor at a publishing house
- William Faulkner - factory worker and screenwriter
- Barbara Kingsolver - science writer and journalist
- Ted Kooser - insurance representative
- Zora Neale Hurston - anthropologist
- Pablo Neruda - diplomat
- Dorothy Parker - piano player at a dance school, later hired by Vogue
- Wallace Stevens - an insurance executive
- Amy Tan - worked as a language development consultant and a freelance business writer
- Walt Whitman - worked as a nurse
- William Carlos Williams - a doctor
We know we're missing many other great examples. Help us out if you know some that aren't on the list.
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Last Updated ( Feb 04, 2007 at 04:37 PM )
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