Poets' Odd Jobs | Hacker News Reader

Poets' Odd Jobs

poets.org

85 pointsalekq45 comments

This reminds me of a book I recently enjoyed: Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self Help Book by novelist Walker Percy. One of his best questions was on "the problem of re-entry", i.e. how does one go from plumbing the very depths of existence/meaning back to the mundane of standing in line to buy groceries. How does one "re-enter" "normal life"? The book doesn't so much as answer the question as make the reader ponder it, but it does have an interlude on writers and their propensity toward alcohol (which, given his career as a novelist, one could say he has valid insight into).

WARNING: personal, non-verifiable theory about to be presented

When coming across modern writers I will often check their biography to see what odd-jobs they have had. I feel that modern man can become so insulated in modern life (e.g. spending an entire career in academia with, say, no hobbies that are grounded in actual life such as fishing, serious gardening, etc) that he can become very disconnected and overly "heady" or "abstract". As such, I often am glad to see when an artist or writer has some terribly mundane and tactile job on their resume. I know that as somebody drawn to the arts I have been incredibly thankful for my unplanned career in software as it has opened my eyes to many naive thoughts I had as to "how the world works".

Tangentially related, but I enjoyed the brr.fyi three-part series on re-entering "normal life" after a year at the South Pole: https://brr.fyi/posts/redeployment-part-one

Philip Glass supported himself as a plumber

>“I had gone to install a dishwasher in a loft in SoHo,” he says. “While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”

https://kottke.org/18/04/philip-glass-i-expected-to-have-a-d...

I heard a story once about Glass driving someone in a taxi and the passenger saw his license and said what an interesting coincidence, he was on his way to see a concert of music by a man named Philip Glass. I don’t remember if Glass revealed his identity or not.

I think I found the source for that. Doesn't say whether Glass revealed his identity, though.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/nov/24/arts.highe...

> Einstein on the Beach was premiered in Avignon on July 25 1976. Glass and Wilson were then offered the option of two performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where the critical reaction was delirious: "One listens to the music just as one watches Wilson's shifting tableaus," wrote John Rockwell in the New York Times, "and somehow, without knowing it, one crosses the line from being puzzled or irritated to being absolutely bewitched." The day after the performance, Glass was back driving his taxi: "I vividly remember the moment, shortly after the Met adventure," he says, "when a well-dressed woman got into my cab. After noting the name of the driver, she leaned forward and said: 'Young man, do you realise you have the same name as a very famous composer'."

That’s the story. Well done.

> When coming across modern writers I will often check their biography to see what odd-jobs they have had. I feel that modern man can become so insulated in modern life (e.g. spending an entire career in academia with, say, no hobbies that are grounded in actual life such as fishing, serious gardening, etc) that he can become very disconnected and overly "heady" or "abstract". As such, I often am glad to see when an artist or writer has some terribly mundane and tactile job on their resume. I know that as somebody drawn to the arts I have been incredibly thankful for my unplanned career in software as it has opened my eyes to many naive thoughts I had as to "how the world works".

I agree with the idea but I was very surprised by the last part of your comment because, in my experience, software engineering fits perfectly into the type of job that you call "disconnected" and "abstract" rather than anything "grounded in actual life".

I always found software to be extremely concrete activity. All that stuff going on in your head still needs to be typed or nothing changes. A failing memory model on your development machine is a really unpleasant wake up call that all this stuff is operating in the real world.

You can try to abstract as much as you want, but you can’t hand wave the speed of light or even just the messy world of user problems / 3rd party software issues.

first time i read the term “serious gardening”, quite poetic itself.

A modern example is Dana Gioia, who switched from poetry grad school to business school, did that for ~15 years, and eventually went back to full-time writing, chaired the NEA, and is I think the current poet laureate ot California. Here's a bit from an interview, about his time working at Jell-O, that weaves this together [1]:

> Every day for a year a group of us would meet after lunch and try every recipe ever devised for Jell-O. They were all elaborate and time-consuming. Finally we happened upon a recipe for small slices of concentrated Jell-O that you could pick up with your fingers. I had all the men on the team make them with me. We figured if we could make them, anyone could. We added the idea of shapes and negotiated with Bill Cosby to advertise them. Every box in the U.S. sold off the shelves. My job at the National Endowment for the Arts is oddly similar: to understand how to take all the agency’s resources and, in addition to everything else we’re doing, come up with a few ideas that are transformative.

And more relevant to this thread:

> I would tell young poets worried about struggling to make a living at their craft to consider alternatives in business before launching an academic career. A poet always struggles. If you work in business, you have the freedom to choose the ring you struggle in. There are many jobs in which a creative person who can write excels. An N.E.A. grant can be a watershed in a writer’s career. It’s the first time some people can write full time. The grant is financial, but also validating. Honor can be even more valuable than money to artists. It gives them the right to take their artistic vocation more seriously.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/jobs/28boss.html

We poets walk amongst you on HN also. Our poems aren’t very good, but then our code isn’t either ;)

We're bad poets and we know it - our git history shows it.

You reminded me of the “Git and GitHub for Poets” tutorial videos that Daniel Shiffman did for his Coding Train YouTube channel.

I wrote one once that I tried to also express using bad UML, as a sort of artistic experiment.

It was...not great. I still think the work was a decent expression of my emotional state at the time, even if the UML-ified version sucked.

(but then, _a lot_ of UML sucks, so....)

Reminds me of Norvig’s PowerPoint of the Gettysburg address (not strictly poetry, but certainly some of the most poetic prose in English rhetoric)…

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm

with our eyes wide and bright

on the orange site, we write

in curiosity, we find delight

here: a land of the bit and the byte

do you also do line breaks in your code like you would in a poem? the linter doesn't understand. i broke the line like that for a reason, mainly because it makes it more readable. have never worked with a programmer who understood that.

In chat programs today and all the way back to my early IRC years, I've been putting a space between a ? or ! and the preceding word, if the word is at the end of the line/paragraph.

Coffee? Yes, please !

It's probably just a neurodivergent quirk, but it's always felt far more readable and just... right.

  I have freed  
  the symbols  
  from your  
  clumsy lines

  which  
  the linter probably  
  considers  
  in error  
    
  Indulge me  
  it's more readable  
  neat functions  
  in neat form

Not in Python. Whitespace and lineation can be important in some poems and Python just doesn't have the flexibility.

I have experimented with Javascript eval(``) ... but prefer not to talk about it.

python is one of the languages where i do this. it's more using good typographical practices with line breaks, rather than using whitespace. especially with code comments

Philip Glass, the composer, supported himself throughout his life as a cab driver and a plumber. There's a great story of him installing a dishwasher for the art critic of Time magazine.

My favorite contemporary composer.

When you support yourself through odd jobs, you can make bolder artistic statements, and show a middle finger to the art world, if you will. When an artist is a professor/teacher whose job is to teach the tradition in the mainstream way, they end up being immensely conservative. Just look at someone like Schoenberg who is -- of course -- considered an iconoclast by the academic art elite but his music is an extremely conservative extension of Western counterpoint and late German Romanticism in a very predictable way: make it more harmonically adventurous/experimental within the 12EDO framework... It's been everyone's go-to since forever, I mean Chopin made a fortune (and a mountain of novel piano music) off of it. Schoenberg simply refused to see what was right in front of his eyes, even though he clearly had gigantic artistic talent, spirit, and motivation (he is also one of my favorite composers, so I'm biased, granted). I really think teaching is not very compatible for artists who first and foremost want to be artists. Someone who wants to create, first and foremost, something new, profound, and personal... Of course, you'll find countless people who'll disagree with me staunchly...

There is also a group of poets who do live off their poetry, though many are more known by other terms such as "singer-songwriter", "rapper", etc

IIRC Leonard Cohen started performing his poems as a singer to make a living.

Art Garfunkel often gives performances of music and spoken-word poetry, but he refers to the poetry as “vignettes.” I believe it’s to keep the audience from being turned off by the word poetry.

This reminds me of Steven Pressfield's works. The professional does what they need to do to complete the work. Once the work is done, they being to allocate for the next one.

“While [Langston] Hughes was working at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., he saw poet Vachel Lindsay dining in the restaurant. Hughes slipped three poems under Lindsay’s plate, including his now-famous “The Weary Blues.” Impressed, Lindsay called for the busboy and asked who wrote the poems, and Hughes responded that he did. Lindsay read Hughes’s poems at a public performance that night and introduced him to publishers. The next day, a local newspaper ran an article about the “Negro busboy poet,” and reporters and diners flocked to meet him. The next year, Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues.”

Vachel Lindsay himself took a couple of long-distance walking tours where he eschewed carrying money and would knock on strangers' doors each night to offer his poetry in exchange for food and shelter. His book about one of these tours is fascinating, it was a very different time in America: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67947

I have not been myself, but there is an exhibition currently at The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University called "Day Jobs":

https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/day-jobs

Philip Larkin: librarian

Wasn't an odd job though, he had a pretty good career as I understand it

  File that in the Staff Picks nooks
  As one nine six dash three
  (though not at all LOC) -
  Between the end of the "Chatterley" books
  And the Beatles' "Please, Please Me"

I remember hearing librarians described as "people who can find stuff, not only when it has been filed correctly, but also when it's been mis-shelved or just plain dropped behind something else."

(Note that Zweig puts the beginning of sexual intercourse at 1918; does every generation think their kids invented it?)

Tax collector? The tax was the (very unpopular) excise, and Burns wrote the poem "The Deil's Awa wi the Excise Man": https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/node/id/420 .

I suppose that the modern equivalent would be holding down a job in academia and writing op-ed articles about how terrible it is for the country. But you can't sing an op-ed.

There’s a passage in A Moveable Feast where Hemingway recounts an attempt to solicit funds to get T. S. Eliot out of the bank so he could focus on his poetry. I don’t think that succeeded, but Eliot eventually moved to an editorial position at the publisher Faber and Faber.

I'm actually more curious what current poets do.

Creative writing teacher.

created WordPress (Matt Mullenweg, author of motto "code is poetry")

Not that many, perhaps a bit surprisingly.

Cash trust fund checks.

I build and deploy business process automations to AWS using Python.

I love this response. The beauty of claiming one’s art with a confident but plain “I” and then following with a clear and concise answer.

How do you view your day job? As a necessary evil to pay the bills? As a good “real world” counterweight to the arts? I ask in good faith and genuine curiosity as I am likewise drawn to the arts but have over the years come to appreciate how my tech career keeps my feet planted on the ground.

I find myself grateful I can support my family financially, as it's statistically unlikely my art can ever permit me to quit my day job.

Not to imply that it's in any way a quality peculiar to those who write poetry in their free time (I know it isn't), but my need for creative expression regularly seeps into the coding standards to which I hold myself, insofar as I demand a certain beauty-- such as such a thing is ever even possible-- out of the libraries I write.

You can get an interesting sampler by picking up a recent Best American Poetry and looking at the bios in the back. Some are academics, but there are also doctors, lawyers, accountants, and so forth. I had a long-running project which attempted to rank graduate creative writing programs by their alumni’s appearances in the prize anthologies and one interesting byproduct was collecting a lot of author bios. I think the bios for those who I could confirm had no graduate creative writing degree or could not find evidence of one were the most interesting.

https://creativewritingmfa.info/rankings/Nograduatecreativew...

https://creativewritingmfa.info/rankings/unknown.html

I know/knew a few, they usually balance things like teaching, magazine writing, maintaining social media accounts for brands, copywriting for ads, and tech jobs.

a bunch of poets from the 'beat generation' also lived of odd jobs

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