A Successful Poet: Is There Such a Creature?

I caught the end of an interview with a poet in the radio a while back. I don't remember which poet it was, but the interviewer asked her what she listed as her occupation when she was applying for, say, a car loan. The poet laughed and said in those moments it was fortunate that she was able to write "professor". The interview was light-hearted, but it brought up an important point about the occupation of a poet; It is not seen as a lucrative career choice.

This is, of course, part of the reason why many people do not pursue a career as a poet. If there are successful contemporary poets in the world today, we certainly don't hear about them unless we look them up ourselves. We don't read their work in high school.

Furthermore, what does it mean to be a successful poet? If it means that you can live off the money you make from your published poems, then I doubt there are any successful poets at all. If it means you are listed on poets.org, that's rather anticlimactic.

I think, as poets, we have to determine for ourselves what success would look like. For me, success is twofold: 1. To be published in Poetry Magazine and 2. To have a published collection of poems that people actually read. But it would also be awesome to win the Nobel Prize or be named Poet Laureate! Haha!

What would success look like to you?

Today's Poem: Success is counted sweetest by Emily Dickinson

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne'er succeed.

To comprehend a nectar

Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host

Who took the Flag today

Can tell the definition

So clear of victory

As he defeated – dying –

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Burst agonized and clear!

A Helpful Website

I just found what is arguably the most helpful website ever. Poets & Writers has their own magazine with their own contests and such as well as forums where you can connect with other writers, but the truly helpful part is the searchable database of literary magazines!! It's user-friendly with pretty little thumbnails, information about payment to contributors and reading periods, and links to the magazines' websites of course.

I wish I had found this site a year ago. I've literally been compiling my own list of literary magazines in a sad, bulky word document. It's going to feel so good to delete this word document.  

Spotlight on Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith (born in 1972) is the recipient of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her work Life on Mars (2011). She has also written two other collections, The Body's Question (2003) and Duende (2007). 

Smith always loved poetry, even as a child, but it wasn't until she was a sophomore at Harvard that she began writing seriously. She attended workshops and got involved in The Dark Room Collective (http://www.pw.org/content/the_dark_room_collective_then_and_now), a community of black writers who hosted a reading series. In an interview with Gulf Coast in 2004 she said of these early days "Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction." 

For Smith, being a poet requires what she described in a conversation with Elizabeth Alexander as "a kind of commitment to living a certain way: to looking closely at details, to feeling things with great fervency, to never moving too far from a kind of childlike wonder and questioning." In that same conversation she discussed her process of writing as an attempt at following the plans that the poem has for itself. She said, "I try to write when I'm feeling uncertain about where I ought to be going, when the things foremost in my mind are questions and distant wishes."

She graduated with a B.A. from Harvard in 1994 and went on to get a M.F.A in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Today she teaches Creative Writing at Princeton. Smith's advice to young poets is to read poetry of all genres and eras, and not to be afraid to ask questions in poems. In an interview with The Aviary she said, "I believe that it is usually what we haven't yet come to grips with that makes for the most interesting material."

Here she is reading Duende:

Relaunch

I apologize for my disappearance. I finished up my last senester at William & Mary, and had a baby. I am now, however, ready to get back to my pursuit of poetry with renewed vigor!