Full-Time Poet?

A few days ago, I asked Twitter whether the expression Full-Time Poet is a contradiction in terms. The wide range of replies was fascinating.

Some people homed in on the cash, as in the need for an inheritance or a high-earning partner if somebody wanted to devote all their time to writing. This suggestion, in turn, garnered responses from others who understood Full-Time to be a synonym of Professional. In other words, certain poets do view themselves as Full-Time in the sense that their professional lives revolve around poetry: its teaching, its workshopping, its reviewing, etc, which also combines with their own writing. The counter-argument, of course, is that their workload means that they might not have much time or energy left for actual creation of the genre, meaning that they’re anything but Full-Time in one sense but completely committed in another.

And then there’s an alternative take, which is implicit in my loaded question. This involves questioning whether poetry is improved by spending eight hours a day at a desk, trying to write, draft and re-draft the stuff. It wonders whether the creation of poetry’s not better served by other stimuli, be they sleeping (!), drinking or doing a job that has nothing to do with poetry whatsoever. Moreover, this issue connects with a false dichotomy between so-called Amateur and Professional poets, as if the origin of a person’s earnings were to dictate the artistic value of their creation. On both sides of this absurd debate, there seem to be delicate egos.

For what it’s worth, my own perspective was brought into focus by my wife when I mentioned this issue to her. She innocently remarked that if I stopped talking to her in the car because I was mulling over a stanza, or if she found herself waiting by the door, shopping bags in hand, because I’d suddenly had to jot down a line in my notebook before we left for the market, then I was most definitely a Full-Time Poet myself. In other words, the term might well be applied to anyone who writes in the genre. This is down to the fact that our creative process is alive, both consciously and subconsciously, in our heads and hearts, throughout the day and night. We never stop being poets, starting to write our poems long before we put pen to paper…