Thug Life

A life in poetry: what might that mean? How do poets occupy office jobs or fly in airplanes or deal with bureaucrats differently from non-poets?

I can recognize poets whose writing is on the same continuum as their everyday life (for some reason it’s not “professional” poets I think of this way so much as activist poets like kari edwards, or writers like John Wieners or Hannah Wiener, whose phone calls and poems and notebooks and symptoms seem of one piece). But in so many situations that happen off the page, I’m not sure what the ‘poetic’ response is. Some soufflé of openness, freedom, orneriness, goofiness, and encouragement where possible of those values in others, plus not being a Republican.

That doesn’t seem grand enough to constitute “a life lived in poetry,” the way an Alice Notley or Nada Gordon or Ezra Pound or Juliana Spahr conceives it, or the way I imagine they conceive it judging from the energies that animate their poetry.

If there’s still any romance left in being a poet, it hovers around this question for me. It’s the life you want in the end more than the poems—otherwise you’re just left with some version of that creepy Eliot/Stevens/Gioia model of the businessman-poet, spreadsheets by day and poems slipped out of a drawer by night.

I guess what I’m wondering is what poetry looks like without the poems.