Here are two poetry stories from England: First, Carol Ann Duffy has been appointed England’s first female ??? and first openly gay ??? poet laureate. On the same day that the news about Duffy’s appointment broke, the British literary world mourned the death of the poet UA Fanthorpe, who only began publishing poetry at age 50, producing nine books in 29 years. The Guardian, along with a number of poets and critics, including Carol Ann Duffy, had mounted a campaign to have Fanthorpe named poet laureate after the death of Ted Hughes in 1999, but she was passed over in favor of Andrew Motion. In a piece in yesterday’s Guardian Books, Duffy noted Fanthorpe’s death as she honored her “sisters in poetry.”
In other poetry news, I came across this interview with Tilda Swinton recently, in which she talks about her ambition to be a poet, which she abandoned while a student at Cambridge University in the early 1980s. (She has, the interviewer notes, recently begun publishing the odd piece of film criticism in Colin MacCabe’s Critical Quarterly.) Two things immediately come to mind when I read something like that:
First, there’s something profoundly sad, and utterly human, in the idea that someone like Tilda Swinton looks back with regret on her life because she abandoned writing. According to the interview, Swinton doesn’t really think of herself as an actor: “It has truly never been my intention to be a performer, and I think it’s probably best that I stop performing pretty soon and start writing.” I’d be sorry if Swinton gave up acting, since she’s one of the few actors working in films who seems to me to make consistently interesting choices, but I’m not really surprised by her tone of regret. I know too many wildly accomplished people who secretly feel themselves to be failures because they once aspired to be writers.
Which brings me to my second response: What, exactly, does it mean to be a poet? Does it simply mean to publish? To teach workshops? To give readings? That’s what most of the poets I know do, but it’s more an effect than a cause. You can’t make a living by writing poetry, so poets have found ways to survive by feeding what remains of the culture’s meager hunger for poetry, mainly in the university classroom. But that’s not what makes you a poet. The only thing that can reliably do that is writing poems.
But here’s the strange thing in the regret that so many people feel about not writing: unlike, say, being an actress, or a dancer, you don’t need anyone’s permission to write. There’s no audition, no casting call or couch (despite how much it might seem that way at AWP). Getting published might be hard, and getting hired to teach workshops is no picnic, but the writing ??? unlike performing arts ??? is quite literally in your hands.
What most people mean when they say “I want to write,” is “I want to be able to quit my job, go live in a cabin by the beach, and spend my days writing.” I got through grad school working for lawyers (well, that and petty crime), and I can’t tell you how many wealthy lawyers, when they heard I was doing a degree in literature, told me that they secretly dreamed of giving it all up to write “the novel.” Then they’d tell me, defensively, why they couldn’t: mortgage, car payments, kids in private school… I’d sit there, nodding, and think, “They don’t want to write. They want to be writers.” A few years later, when I finished grad school and got a teaching job (less crime, more petty), I found the only way to keep writing was to get up at 4:00 a.m., so that I got in a day’s work as a writer before my day’s work as a teacher. Mortgage, car payment, kid in private school: we’ve all got ’em, but that’s about the money, not the writing.
I hope Tilda doesn’t give up acting, because I enjoy her work. But I suspect that her wish to give up all that fame, money, and glamour to “start writing” is really an expression of her wish to leave Hollywood behind and cleanse her soul in the purifying waters of poetry. That’s a common fantasy among those who have found success in other fields, but let’s be honest, it’s the kind of thing you say in interviews when you’ve put in a long day being glamorous for reporters in an expensive hotel suite or a stylish Beverly Hills caf??. The only thing that really makes you a writer is to write.
So write, Tilda. Write between takes, write between interviews and photo shoots. Get up early in the morning and write before the kids wake up. Pull the car over at the side of the road to write after you drop them at school. Write on airplanes, write in expensive hotel suites after the reporters have gone, or in stylish Beverly Hills caf??s. (If you’re writing, we’ll leave you alone. We promise.) If that doesn’t work, come spend a week at the KR Writer’s Workshop one summer. If David Baker and Carl Phillips can’t light the flame, no one can.
UA Fanthorpe left her teaching job after sixteen years to work as a secretary and receptionist, writing poems in her first book about the patients she encountered while working in a hospital. Despite the myths, being a poet doesn’t mean withdrawing from the world to dwell in splendid isolation. Most poets have to make a living, and it’s what they encounter in that fallen world that generally gives life to their poems.