I’m going to start this talk by
going on a pretentious tangent and thinking a little bit about the “history” of
the American poet’s relationship to 9 to 5 jobs. This may initially feel like
putzing around instead of talking about the day to day realities of negotiating
wage-working life with life as a writer, but it’ll help get at an idea that
forms a backdrop to everything I’ll say. And that idea, to just the ending away
up front, is that labor—and I’m including here both paid wage work and the
unpaid work we all do to continue to exist—labor profoundly structures how we
spend time and energy in our lives, and that this makes it a fundamental
shaping force of our creative process and the finished work that comes out of
that process. Now, this is kind of stupid-obvious, and saying it makes me feel
like I’m 19 again, reading Marx for the first time and thinking I had a this
awesome materialist understanding of, like, everything, but looking at the particulars
of how this plays out in the lives of myself and others, and thinking about how
best to respond to those particulars to ensure a continued creative existence—well,
that becomes for me an endlessly fascinating discussion.
But anyway, onward to this
“history.” I put “history” in quotes here because while I am talking in part
about actual history I’m also talking about currently held perceptions of what
it means to be, do, and live as a poet, and regardless of the actual historical
accuracy of some of these images, they do tend to exert a controlling force
that, full disclosure, I want to do my part to negate. I’m sticking with talking
about poets here, particularly from certain avant-garde traditions in the
United States, because that’s what I know about, so you may or may not find
this resonates with your own experience, but that’s what I’ve got for you.
In any case, the first question I’d ask is, when we say “avant-garde poet,” what image comes to mind? At its most base and stereotypical, we get someone who’s probably a drunk or an addict, possibly has sex with a lot of people, and who isn’t particularly, how shall we say, employed or, how shall we say, employable. Maybe they teach, work some kind of part time job editing technical books, are a mooch, are an independently wealthy scion of a fallen aristocrat family, something like that. They definitely may have worked on an oil freighter or whaling vessel one summer. Overall what they have, though, is plenty of time. I’m thinking of course of your Jack Kerouac type, or your second generation New York School type, but I’m also thinking of certain Bay Area language poets in the 1970s and 80s, writing all day in their shitty apartments and then going to the talk at New Langton Arts or wherever. Now, this typology is, well, oppressive, in that it silences the actual life histories of the numerous poets whose lives were anything but this kind of idyllic avant paradise. That avant-garde poet image almost automatically calls to mind a white male, and indeed, we can be fairly certain that white males had the easiest time living out something like that image—often, we should note, with great assistance from the salaries and unpaid labor of their female partners. But the experiences of living and working poets, whether folks of color of any gender, white women, poets who had caregiving labor to perform for children or others, and yes, including some white men—well, these were also members of these poetic communities, and their lives paint a very different picture of what being a poet looked like, and furthermore, it should be noted that their ongoing engagement with those poetry communities often came with much greater strain and personal costs.
Still, despite these corrective counter-histories, which do really need to be constantly recovered and re-asserted, and despite the myriad economic and social challenges poets faced in eras earlier than ours, I’m going to contend that up until the late 1970s in this country it was broadly easier, from a monetary and work perspective at least, to live the life of this archetypal avant-garde poet than it is today. This is, I think, for all the reasons that one might usually rehearse: flat real wage rates for the middle and working classes for the past 30 years; the rise in the cost of living, including things like rent, food, and higher education; the greater availability of credit and debt-financed consumption to make up for shortfalls in wages; the dynamics of structural unemployment; the slashing of state-sponsored assistance programs starting under Reagan; and more recently the expectation in some jobs of mandatory unpaid overtime and constant availability, and the development of technology that facilitates this colonization of life by work. The net effect, I think, is that it becomes necessary for poets and people in general to have more and more of their time taken up by seeking out, thinking about, and actually doing waged work, in addition to unpaid work like cooking, housework, childcare, and so on. All of this means, despite the real persistence of poets who can, for reasons of age, income, or whatever else, live lives closer to that avant-garde image, all this means that more poets have less time to devote to writing, going to readings, and otherwise going about the business of being poets. That avant-garde archetypal ideal, never achievable for many, has become achievable for even fewer people as time has gone on.
I’m going to talk more about why this isn’t inherently a good or bad thing as far as our writing practices are concerned, but we’ve reached the end of my historical spiel, which gives me the chance to tell you, obviously, about what this history discussion has been leading up to all along, and that, of course, is me. So, about me: I work full time in Oakland at a nonprofit that authors research-based educational curricula for mostly elementary-school-aged students. It’s a fairly small organization, employing about 50 people on site, 10 or so off site, and a cadre of consultants and freelancers numbering about 60 or 70 more. We contract with independent sales representatives in most of the 50 states and do a limited amount of business in Latin America and the Middle East. Working with these reps is where I come into the picture. As Marketing Logistics Coordinator, I oversee the shipping and logistics surrounding marketing samples and collateral, ensuring these materials flow in a timely manner to sales reps and to potential customers throughout the country and internationally. That’s the cover letter version of what I do. What it means in plain English is that I put shit in boxes and send it places. Yes, there are other aspects to my job, including making sure we have enough shit in the office-slash-micro-warehouse to put in boxes and send to places, and those aspects for better or worse are taking on an expanded role in my job, but essentially, that’s what I do: put shit in boxes, send it to places.
In any case, the first question I’d ask is, when we say “avant-garde poet,” what image comes to mind? At its most base and stereotypical, we get someone who’s probably a drunk or an addict, possibly has sex with a lot of people, and who isn’t particularly, how shall we say, employed or, how shall we say, employable. Maybe they teach, work some kind of part time job editing technical books, are a mooch, are an independently wealthy scion of a fallen aristocrat family, something like that. They definitely may have worked on an oil freighter or whaling vessel one summer. Overall what they have, though, is plenty of time. I’m thinking of course of your Jack Kerouac type, or your second generation New York School type, but I’m also thinking of certain Bay Area language poets in the 1970s and 80s, writing all day in their shitty apartments and then going to the talk at New Langton Arts or wherever. Now, this typology is, well, oppressive, in that it silences the actual life histories of the numerous poets whose lives were anything but this kind of idyllic avant paradise. That avant-garde poet image almost automatically calls to mind a white male, and indeed, we can be fairly certain that white males had the easiest time living out something like that image—often, we should note, with great assistance from the salaries and unpaid labor of their female partners. But the experiences of living and working poets, whether folks of color of any gender, white women, poets who had caregiving labor to perform for children or others, and yes, including some white men—well, these were also members of these poetic communities, and their lives paint a very different picture of what being a poet looked like, and furthermore, it should be noted that their ongoing engagement with those poetry communities often came with much greater strain and personal costs.
Still, despite these corrective counter-histories, which do really need to be constantly recovered and re-asserted, and despite the myriad economic and social challenges poets faced in eras earlier than ours, I’m going to contend that up until the late 1970s in this country it was broadly easier, from a monetary and work perspective at least, to live the life of this archetypal avant-garde poet than it is today. This is, I think, for all the reasons that one might usually rehearse: flat real wage rates for the middle and working classes for the past 30 years; the rise in the cost of living, including things like rent, food, and higher education; the greater availability of credit and debt-financed consumption to make up for shortfalls in wages; the dynamics of structural unemployment; the slashing of state-sponsored assistance programs starting under Reagan; and more recently the expectation in some jobs of mandatory unpaid overtime and constant availability, and the development of technology that facilitates this colonization of life by work. The net effect, I think, is that it becomes necessary for poets and people in general to have more and more of their time taken up by seeking out, thinking about, and actually doing waged work, in addition to unpaid work like cooking, housework, childcare, and so on. All of this means, despite the real persistence of poets who can, for reasons of age, income, or whatever else, live lives closer to that avant-garde image, all this means that more poets have less time to devote to writing, going to readings, and otherwise going about the business of being poets. That avant-garde archetypal ideal, never achievable for many, has become achievable for even fewer people as time has gone on.
I’m going to talk more about why this isn’t inherently a good or bad thing as far as our writing practices are concerned, but we’ve reached the end of my historical spiel, which gives me the chance to tell you, obviously, about what this history discussion has been leading up to all along, and that, of course, is me. So, about me: I work full time in Oakland at a nonprofit that authors research-based educational curricula for mostly elementary-school-aged students. It’s a fairly small organization, employing about 50 people on site, 10 or so off site, and a cadre of consultants and freelancers numbering about 60 or 70 more. We contract with independent sales representatives in most of the 50 states and do a limited amount of business in Latin America and the Middle East. Working with these reps is where I come into the picture. As Marketing Logistics Coordinator, I oversee the shipping and logistics surrounding marketing samples and collateral, ensuring these materials flow in a timely manner to sales reps and to potential customers throughout the country and internationally. That’s the cover letter version of what I do. What it means in plain English is that I put shit in boxes and send it places. Yes, there are other aspects to my job, including making sure we have enough shit in the office-slash-micro-warehouse to put in boxes and send to places, and those aspects for better or worse are taking on an expanded role in my job, but essentially, that’s what I do: put shit in boxes, send it to places.
So why would anyone want this job? One reason, of course, is that it pays better than any other job I’ve had and provides me with a health insurance plan that can cover my partner and stepson, and believe me, that’s no small reason. But the other ones basically boil down to a few things that set this job apart from what to me are the essentially interchangeable office jobs one sees when trolling through places like Craigslist. First, I actually like the people I work with—my workplace has a pretty high tolerance for weirdos in unconventional business casual, and that makes going to work every day a much more tolerable affair than it otherwise might be. Second, the work I do is fairly independent—I have a lot of control over how I structure and prioritize what goes on during my workday, and that gives me some space to breathe during the 8 or so hours of every day that I’m forced to sell to others. And most importantly, third, this independence couples with the repetitive and relatively mindless nature of the work in such a way that I can reclaim a segment of that 8 hours for my own ends, and particularly for my own education. For the two and a half years that I’ve had this job I’ve been able to listen to my iPod for long, uninterrupted stretches as I’m building samples, packing, and shipping. The audio content is basically whatever I can get my hands on. I’ve listened to BBC documentaries, experimental radio via the Third Coast Audio Festival, large portions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, David Harvey’s lectures on Marx’s Capital, an entire course on financial markets, an entire course on the history of prisons and punishment, a lot of NPR, and bits and pieces of a lot else. Essentially, built into the structure of my job is the opportunity to effectively steal time and, weirdly, still be able to work while I’m doing it.
The degree to which we can steal time has formed a key component in the job choices of many a poet. At my previous job working as a legal assistant, there was also a large amount of dead time that I could use for myself. I wrote the entirety of a collaborative chapbook at work, and a fair portion of other raw writing material was generated there as well. At a certain point with that job, the understimulation of working for a semi-present lawyer in a solo practice and doing a whole lot of dictation and filing eventually rotted my brain and left me with little energy or content to translate into writing, and so I was very happy when I left that job. Incidentally, this points to a pretty important thing to be aware of when it comes to these kinds of jobs, which is that they definitely have a limited shelf life. But still, the underlying principal of seeking out jobs where I can carve out a bit of space for myself has remained, and I think if you ask any poet with an office job whether that was a factor in their decision, you’re going to get a lot of answers in the affirmative. On a practical note, if you’re interested in getting one of those jobs, I’ve had a lot of luck in finding them through temping—both my legal assistant job and my current job started as temp assignments that were a day or two long, and while it’s not really the rule that in a down economy you can automatically turn temp assignments into permanent jobs, the advantage to it is that you can sample workplaces and find ones that distinguish themselves from those interchangeable Craigslist ones I mentioned before, whether due to their friendly environments, their opportunities for time theft, or both.
So yes, a large reason for my choice of job is the chance to reclaim a portion of that work time for myself, for intellectual development or creative work. But working a day job still exerts enormous shaping effects on your time, which brings us back to where this talk began. Where I once might’ve been able to live a life closer to that avant-garde poet image, at this point, between the 8 hours filled with interruptions, phone calls, standing up, sitting down, applying labels, moving packages, and so on, and then going home and doing household and step-parenting work, my life isn’t structured like that mythical poet, and that in turn affects the ways and things I write. It’s not as though my writing practice now no longer in any way resembles the writing practice I had when I was 23, because there’s a lot about it that does, but still, I’m not going to be sitting down to write my epic any time soon, and a four-hour writing and editing binge is a less-than-common event. And as I’ve said, my contention here is that with the ongoing changes in the contemporary realities of work, the kind of work-filled life I’m describing is a more and more common state for people writing today. When you leave school, you may, whether slowly or quickly, find that your life gets more and more work-filled too.
That might freak you out, and I don’t blame you if it does. It freaks me out. I mean, if your writing practice has up to now involved regularly staying up until 3 am or going into some intense quasi-meditative state or something, then feeling yourself being domesticated by a day job can feel pretty fucking awful. But if we can remain open and flexible in how we approach our lives as creative people, then as I said before, these kinds of life changes due to work don’t necessarily need to be so terrible. From where I stand, there are two major choices we can make in response to this kind of constriction in our time: first, we can struggle for that time, fight to carve out and reclaim it for the creative work that sustains us, or second, we can recognize that the dream of being that avant-garde poet with nothing to do but write is less and less viable, and we can accept that this is going to change the way we do writing and the kinds of writing that we produce. So obviously this is a false binary—we all have to do both. As a writer and a human, you need to struggle against forces that perpetually want to take away your time and occupy your space. But I want to emphasize a discussion of the second choice, because I think so many of us, myself included, end up quite unsettled when our writing process and product starts not to jell with our internal conceptions of what “legitimate” writing looks like. But I’d rather have us assert that all writing processes that somehow engage the mind and excite us, no matter how seemingly stupid, minor, or small, are legitimate writing processes that lead to legitimate writing. Not that all of that writing is good, of course, but there’s a difference between good and legitimate. But nonetheless, if as your life and time structures changes, as they inevitably will in some ways, and if you find a way or kind of writing that interests you and that you can manage to fit into that changing life, whatever its structure may be, then latch on to that form of writing, even if it feels weird or not even like writing or art or anything to take seriously, even if it’s not what you think you want your writing to be. The apparent limitations imposed by your life may in fact lead you to produce far more exciting work than you would’ve produced with 24 hours a day devoted to writing.
I’m going to end by quickly talking about what my version of this has been lately. Without really knowing it, I abruptly found that my writing practice had started to include work on what’s about the junkiest medium I can think of: Facebook. It still embarrasses me to claim it as a part of my actual writing practice and not just, like, a place that at best serves as a storehouse of raw material or, at worst, is merely a place to goof off and waste time. But in the process of writing “regular” status updates I more and more found myself posting weird little fragments that have come to feel like a live, ongoing language performance. Some people have wanted to publish them, and invariably, material from there will end up published on paper—I have a chapbook coming out soon that actually grew out of me doing work on Facebook. But I’m not sure that it requires publication on paper to be a legitimate part of my writing practice. Is this project interesting, artistic, good? I’m not sure. Is every status update a part of this “performance”? Probably not, but I don’t know where the border is. Is this whole idea of Facebook writing just lazy, pretentious, and awful? Entirely possible. But it is writing, and I have to accept it as a part of what I do as a writer. It’s one more point in this expanded field of poetry that I see us all continuing to map out together.
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