[HN Gopher] Poets' Odd Jobs
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Poets' Odd Jobs
Author : alekq
Score : 44 points
Date : 2024-06-03 09:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (poets.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (poets.org)
| k1ns wrote:
| This reminds me of Steven Pressfield's works. The professional
| does what they need to do to complete the work. Once the work is
| done, they being to allocate for the next one.
| shove wrote:
| We poets walk amongst you on HN also. Our poems aren't very good,
| but then our code isn't either ;)
| jvm___ wrote:
| We're bad poets and we know it - our git history shows it.
| layman51 wrote:
| You reminded me of the "Git and GitHub for Poets" tutorial
| videos that Daniel Shiffman did for his Coding Train YouTube
| channel.
| ubertaco wrote:
| I wrote one once that I tried to also express using bad UML, as
| a sort of artistic experiment.
|
| It was...not great. I still think the work was a decent
| expression of my emotional state at the time, even if the UML-
| ified version sucked.
|
| (but then, _a lot_ of UML sucks, so....)
| ioblomov wrote:
| Reminds me of Norvig's PowerPoint of the Gettysburg address
| (not strictly poetry, but certainly some of the most poetic
| prose in English rhetoric)...
|
| http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm
| zerojames wrote:
| with our eyes wide and bright
|
| on the orange site, we write
|
| in curiosity, we find delight
|
| here: a land of the bit and the byte
| scop wrote:
| This reminds me of a book I recently enjoyed: _Lost in the
| Cosmos: the Last Self Help Book_ by novelist Walker Percy. One of
| his best questions was on "the problem of re-entry", i.e. how
| does one go from plumbing the very depths of existence/meaning
| back to the mundane of standing in line to buy groceries. How
| does one "re-enter" "normal life"? The book doesn't so much as
| answer the question as make the reader ponder it, but it does
| have an interlude on writers and their propensity toward alcohol
| (which, given his career as a novelist, one could say he has
| valid insight into).
|
| _WARNING: personal, non-verifiable theory about to be presented_
|
| When coming across modern writers I will often check their
| biography to see what odd-jobs they have had. I feel that modern
| man can become so insulated in modern life (e.g. spending an
| entire career in academia with, say, no hobbies that are grounded
| in actual life such as fishing, serious gardening, etc) that he
| can become very disconnected and overly "heady" or "abstract". As
| such, I often am glad to see when an artist or writer has some
| terribly mundane and tactile job on their resume. I know that as
| somebody drawn to the arts I have been incredibly thankful for my
| unplanned career in software as it has opened my eyes to many
| naive thoughts I had as to "how the world works".
| vwcx wrote:
| Tangentially related, but I enjoyed the brr.fyi three-part
| series on re-entering "normal life" after a year at the South
| Pole: https://brr.fyi/posts/redeployment-part-one
| leoh wrote:
| Philip Glass supported himself as a plumber
|
| >"I had gone to install a dishwasher in a loft in SoHo," he
| says. "While working, I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to
| find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at
| me in disbelief. 'But you're Philip Glass! What are you doing
| here?' It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and
| I told him I would soon be finished. 'But you are an artist,'
| he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was
| sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let
| me finish."
|
| https://kottke.org/18/04/philip-glass-i-expected-to-have-a-d...
| dhosek wrote:
| I heard a story once about Glass driving someone in a taxi
| and the passenger saw his license and said what an
| interesting coincidence, he was on his way to see a concert
| of music by a man named Philip Glass. I don't remember if
| Glass revealed his identity or not.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Philip Larkin: librarian
|
| Wasn't an odd job though, he had a pretty good career as I
| understand it
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| File that in the Staff Picks nooks As one nine six dash
| three (though not at all LOC) - Between the end of
| the "Chatterley" books And the Beatles' "Please, Please
| Me"
|
| I remember hearing librarians described as "people who can find
| stuff, not only when it has been filed correctly, but also when
| it's been mis-shelved or just plain dropped behind something
| else."
|
| (Note that Zweig puts the beginning of sexual intercourse at
| 1918; does every generation think their kids invented it?)
| belligeront wrote:
| I have not been myself, but there is an exhibition currently at
| The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University called "Day Jobs":
|
| https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/day-jobs
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I'm actually more curious what current poets do.
| josephorjoe wrote:
| Creative writing teacher.
| mikemitchelldev wrote:
| created WordPress (Matt Mullenweg, author of motto "code is
| poetry")
| dhosek wrote:
| Not that many, perhaps a bit surprisingly.
| runamuck wrote:
| Cash trust fund checks.
| mttpgn wrote:
| I build and deploy business process automations to AWS using
| Python.
| dhosek wrote:
| You can get an interesting sampler by picking up a recent _Best
| American Poetry_ and looking at the bios in the back. Some are
| academics, but there are also doctors, lawyers, accountants,
| and so forth. I had a long-running project which attempted to
| rank graduate creative writing programs by their alumni's
| appearances in the prize anthologies and one interesting
| byproduct was collecting a _lot_ of author bios. I think the
| bios for those who I could confirm had no graduate creative
| writing degree or could not find evidence of one were the most
| interesting.
|
| https://creativewritingmfa.info/rankings/Nograduatecreativew...
|
| https://creativewritingmfa.info/rankings/unknown.html
| dvirsky wrote:
| I know/knew a few, they usually balance things like teaching,
| magazine writing, maintaining social media accounts for brands,
| copywriting for ads, and tech jobs.
| julian_t wrote:
| Philip Glass, the composer, supported himself throughout his life
| as a cab driver and a plumber. There's a great story of him
| installing a dishwasher for the art critic of Time magazine.
| gnulinux wrote:
| My favorite contemporary composer.
|
| When you support yourself through odd jobs, you can make bolder
| artistic statements, and show a middle finger to the art world,
| if you will. When an artist is a professor/teacher whose job is
| to teach the tradition in the mainstream way, they end up being
| immensely conservative. Just look at someone like Schoenberg
| who is -- of course -- considered an iconoclast by the academic
| art elite but his music is an extremely conservative extension
| of Western counterpoint and late German Romanticism in a very
| predictable way: make it more harmonically
| adventurous/experimental within the 12EDO framework... It's
| been everyone's go-to since forever, I mean Chopin made a
| fortune (and a mountain of novel piano music) off of it.
| Schoenberg simply refused to see what was right in front of his
| eyes, even though he clearly had gigantic artistic talent,
| spirit, and motivation (he is also one of my favorite
| composers, so I'm biased, granted). I really think teaching is
| not very compatible for artists who first and foremost want to
| be artists. Someone who wants to create, first and foremost,
| something new, profound, and personal... Of course, you'll find
| countless people who'll disagree with me staunchly...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| "While [Langston] Hughes was working at the Wardman Park Hotel in
| Washington, D.C., he saw poet Vachel Lindsay dining in the
| restaurant. Hughes slipped three poems under Lindsay's plate,
| including his now-famous "The Weary Blues." Impressed, Lindsay
| called for the busboy and asked who wrote the poems, and Hughes
| responded that he did. Lindsay read Hughes's poems at a public
| performance that night and introduced him to publishers. The next
| day, a local newspaper ran an article about the "Negro busboy
| poet," and reporters and diners flocked to meet him. The next
| year, Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary
| Blues."
| tantivy wrote:
| Vachel Lindsay himself took a couple of long-distance walking
| tours where he eschewed carrying money and would knock on
| strangers' doors each night to offer his poetry in exchange for
| food and shelter. His book about one of these tours is
| fascinating, it was a very different time in America:
| https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67947
| namenotrequired wrote:
| There is also a group of poets who do live off their poetry,
| though many are more known by other terms such as "singer-
| songwriter", "rapper", etc
| dvirsky wrote:
| IIRC Leonard Cohen started performing his poems as a singer to
| make a living.
| dhosek wrote:
| There's a passage in _A Moveable Feast_ where Hemingway recounts
| an attempt to solicit funds to get T. S. Eliot out of the bank so
| he could focus on his poetry. I don't think that succeeded, but
| Eliot eventually moved to an editorial position at the publisher
| Faber and Faber.
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