Writers have lifestyles of every sort. There are teacher-writers, parent-writers, and waiter-writers. And probably, somewhere, beekeeper-writers, light keeper writers, and farmer writers (like Timothy Murphy, whom Stephen Burt in this review calls Richard Wilbur’s heir). Construction worker-writers and librarian-writers; software engineer-writers and grocery clerk-writers. I once met a writer who worked as a puppet wrangler, cataloging puppets and their components for an animation studio. I remember also a conversation with a small group writers I didn’t know well in which several of them said they had been, or had tried to be, mortuary attendants.
Most of us have to do something for money. What each one chooses is a matter of temperament and circumstance. Although I’ve always wound up taking what work I can get (including things as weird as hawking cells derived from neonatal discard tissue–i.e., foreskins and umbilical cords), I don’t wish to echo John Barr. I wouldn’t call for “a broader experience base” in poetry, nor would I cast academics as people lacking exposure to the “real world.”
When it comes to subsidizing writing with odd day jobs, there are downsides galore. But in my experience an odd job can be the key ingredient in a lifestyle characterized by the fertile tension between the writing life and the rest of life.
The best day jobs involve contact and exposure rather than immersion and responsibility. You probably can’t change the way you experience the world, a priori, at will; you can however, get close to someone whose profession requires her to see the world entirely differently, as Rilke did when he became Rodin’s secretary.
The best odd jobs involve new vocabularies and unusual materials. Not that you’d necessarily use the vocabularies or write about the materials, and here’s maybe where I differ from John Barr and his poetry-has-become-too-academic school of thought. I don’t know that we need poetry about prosaic aspects of life on the grounds that more people could relate to this kind of poetry. I am pretty sure, however, that being surrounded by strange stuff, stuff you couldn’t have imagined before you saw it, is good for those of us who work with language and abstractions. Odd jobs can make us better at what we do by freshening our experience of language and abstraction and their relationships to the material.
This week I’ve been indulging a truly impossible day job fantasy in which I become an assistant to the late Japanese cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. I have been mesmerized by Tokyo Olympiad, for reasons that have nothing to do with the Olympics. I’m convinced a writer could learn all sorts of things from this man about storytelling, image, and texture. More on this next week.