In a few days, I’ll be publishing an interview I did with the poet Ana Reisens, who will be offering an Ah – the Sea class on submitting to literary magazines next month. As part of that, we discussed “unusual poet career paths.” “Career paths” may be an odd phrase for what I’m talking about. To be less concise but more accurate, maybe what I mean instead is “how poets learned about poetry and how they disseminated their work.”
In August and September of last year, I went through a period where I read up on the lives of a number of well-known poets while teaching The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach, and I created short “capsule biographies” for each poet mentioned in this slim book. I started because I noticed how my own awareness of the lives of different famous poets added important context that enriched what I got out of the book. I knew not everyone in that course would necessarily have that, and I wanted a way to quickly share what I knew without sending them to the longer biographical summaries on Wikipedia and the major poetry sites. However, I was more familiar with some of Longenbach’s example poets than others, and even with poets whose stories I thought I did know well, I discovered some surprises as I read their bios myself to make sure I had my facts straight. I really enjoyed creating them, and what I learned has stuck with me.
One of the most interesting aspects was thinking about the poets who had an atypical “poet career path” for their time. Here are the bios that best exemplify that:
William Blake born 1757 in London; died 1827 in London. Blake left school at age ten, perhaps due to his parents’ recognition of his headstrong temperament. The rest of his education consisted of attending drawing school and his own avid reading. At 14, he was apprenticed to an engraver, and used this trade to eke out a living illustrating commercial books while he completed personal projects, working relentlessly even on the day of his death. Throughout his life, he reported having spiritual visions, and was considered mad by his contemporaries. In his massive anthology Poems for the Millennium, poet and scholar Jerome Rothenberg calls Blake one of the earliest of “a breed of poets who would no longer front for settled truths but flout them as their first, authentic questioners.” Most of us came across the oft-anthologized poems from the Songs of Innocence and of Experience in high school or earlier, but what’s less well-known (at least in English Lit class) are Blake’s experiments with throwing off what he called “the bondage of rhyme and meter” and his illuminated books where he combined illustrations with hand-lettered words.
Walt Whitman born 1819 on Long Island, NY; died 1892 in Camden, NJ. Whitman has been called the father of American poetry, as well as the father of American free verse. His formal schooling ended at age 11, when he started working to help support his struggling family. Whitman began his “literary education” as a printer’s apprentice on Long Island and in New York City, and gradually expanded his abilities in the newspaper industry and started engaging in local intellectual and literary life. He has said that without his work reviewing opera performances for the Brooklyn Eagle, “I never could have written Leaves of Grass,” the collection he self-published in 1855 and that began his fame as a poet. The book was controversial due to both its free verse (modeled after the cadences of the King James Bible) and its offensiveness to contemporary sexual mores. Its publication elicited praise from luminaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson, but also scathing criticism (one published review recommended Whitman commit suicide). It’s now hard to find a list, no matter how short, of “great American poems” that doesn’t include his epic “Song of Myself,” and his funeral was a public event. His poetry was distributed to soldiers in World War II to remind them of the “American Way” they were fighting for. Whitman has inspired a diverse array of American poets in subsequent generations – including Langston Hughes, the Beats, Ezra Pound (grudgingly), Adrienne Rich, and Joy Harjo – as well as European writers and some of the most important poets of Latin America.
Louise Glück born 1943 in New York City, raised on Long Island, died 2023 in Cambridge, MA. Glück suffered from anorexia as a teenager and as a result, did not enroll in college full-time. Instead, she focused on therapy (which she says taught her how to think) and took poetry classes at Sarah Lawrence and the Columbia University School of General Studies (a program intended for non-traditional students). In awarding her the 2020 prize for Literature, the Nobel Committee praised the “austere beauty” of her poetic voice. Scholar Laura Quinney has described Glück – along with Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Elizabeth Bishop – as being part of “the line of American poets who value fierce lyric compression,” characterized as “dark, incisive, and severe.”
There were a few other poets we studied who did not have typical poet paths, or who based on their early lives may have seemed unlikely to become poets. William Carlos Williams of course is famous for being a doctor, and a good chunk of his poetry education may have come from his lifelong friendship with Ezra Pound beginning when they were both students at the University of Pennsylvania (though an English-speaking poet in the early 20th century could not have made a luckier friend). [Ezra Pound disclaimer] Robert Frost did not finish college due to a need to work and, upon his second try, due to illness. Emily Dickinson left Mount Holyoke after only ten months for inconclusive reasons. George Oppen also dropped out of college (to be fair, coming from wealth makes him not a great example). Yeats grew up in a family of artists rather than writers, and he struggled with reading as a child (evidence suggests he may have been dyslexic). Though Marianne Moore attended Bryn Mawr at the same time as H.D. (then one of the very best colleges open to women) and built her poetic reputation through the tried-and-true method of literary magazine submission, she does not appear to have been a part of any poetic community (“network”) until she moved to NYC at around 30 years old, after she already had some recognition.
Then there’s the poets who self-published: self-publishing is more common in history than we might realize. Whitman and Blake, of course, are known for self-publishing. Williams and Pound also paid for the printing of their first books. Oppen and Williams (along with Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff) founded Objectivist Press, which published their own work (including Oppen’s first book). And that’s just the poets in The Art of the Poetic Line. The more I poke around in poetic history, the more I find famous poets who either self-published at some point, or had books put out by what were not exactly the prestigious houses of their day or the most traditional circumstances. For example Claire Marie, the first publisher of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, was primarily a vanity press (though Stein did not pay to have her work published there). Arts patron Carl Van Vechten had recommended to the publisher that he solicit her work, and the publisher, who had a romantic interest in Van Vechten, eagerly followed through with a letter to Stein, misleadingly assuring her that “my public is also the most civilized in this country.”
You can probably qualify any of the examples above. To be fair, these are all exceptional poets, and if you’re looking only at the exceptional, it’s worth being wary when trying to prove anything. Wealth, or at least comfortable financial circumstances, often plays a role, and many times these poets made up for any disadvantages or missteps in other ways. Emily Dickinson continuously sent her poems far and wide in her letters: she corresponded with about a hundred people over the course of her lifetime, and scholars estimate we only have a small portion of her correspondence (are our brains even still equipped to write letters like people did in the 19th century?). While many know Dickinson barely published while she was alive, what’s less-known is that she was scolded by the prominent writer Helen Hunt Jackson for not doing more to get her poems out there, which suggests that it’s only a myth that her contemporaries couldn’t see her brilliance (or that it wasn’t the case for all her contemporaries). In the case of Pound the exception clearly proves the rule: he really hustled to promote that first book, and was so active in the poetry world as an editor and networker that he couldn’t, and still can’t completely, be ignored. Finally, it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that MFA programs – along with the teaching positions they offered and the academic employment standards they imposed – took root. You can’t follow today’s established career path when it doesn’t exist.
But even knowing that I live in a different time and that I’m no Emily Dickinson, or Gertrude Stein, or William Blake, I still feel all these different paths poets have taken helps me loosen up my ideas about what one “should” do to become a poet. It’s a reminder that our measurement of poetic success and many of the rules we impose on ourselves are arbitrary. Yes, for many different reasons, it’s valuable to find your readers, if only as a means of strengthening your voice regardless of the external recognition. And the more you put yourself out there, the more likely you are to be found. But that relationship with readers can take many different forms and doesn’t require intermediaries, institutional endorsement, or a fancy education.
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