Profession and the Poet

All you artistic vice-presidents out there who follow in the footsteps of Frank and Wallace, combining law with assonance and insurance with line-breaks, all you dancing Wu-Li scientists, tracking Kim and resonating your quarks with quatrains, all you immaculate engineers perceiving your geology as submerged metaphor -- may you choke on your year-end bonuses, may your shares in Consolidated Toothbrush decay overnight, your grants be withdrawn, may you swallow your champagne backwards and break into uncontrollable coughing during your own readings, may your flood of literary awards dry up, and your trickle of rejection notices swell to Niagara, may your dividends turn spotty, and your reviews patronizing -- in short, may all the gods of art and industry combine to purge the world once and for all of successful role models -- those who tempt us mortals to hubris, the mad aspiration to "have it all". Enough is enough.

From this you may infer that I am not entirely successful at combining the two solitudes of boardroom and bardroom, of hire and lyre, of bottom line and run-on line. You are correct. Some other people seem to find the combination. Perhaps most others. If so, this is a minority report. I offer it to Museletter in the interest of completeness.

What it comes down to is this: professions are demanding. And their demand is for active and intentional participation. But as William Stafford says: "intention endangers creation." The mode in which we purpose to accomplish objectives is not the irresponsible mode in which we write poetry. And while activity gets a good press, and passivity a bad one, a certain quality of passivity is essential to creation -- what Margaret Avison calls "waiting quietly at/home, upon occurrence." To combine these two modes in the same twenty-four day is difficult -- clearly not impossible, for some people pull it off -- but difficult.

My own little story is simple. With an equal attraction to science and literature I chose science (chemistry) at university -- thinking, perhaps wrongly, that literature I could read on the side whereas science might need the discipline of a solid foundation. I imagined I would work towards a doctorate and spend my life as a research chemist. Not so. The small decisions we make ourselves. The larger ones happen to us by accident. I ended up in chartered accountancy for twenty-eight years. My writing friends say I must have been glad to leave accounting (as I did nine years ago in order to write poetry.) Such a boring profession, they say -- adding up all those numbers. But it wasn't boring at all. Accounting has about as much to do with adding up numbers as poetry has to do with conjugating grammatical tenses. There's some connection but it's not really what it's about. And anyway, writers aren't supposed to believe in stereotypes. For myself, I found it a very challenging career. Each year was unlike the one before. The challenges of adapting to technology-induced transformations as we move into a computer-based information age were and are enormous and stimulating. But I found pursuing a career left little time for contemplation -- or for poetry. My output was about three poems per year. Not enough to learn from beginner mistakes. Just enough to keep repeating them over and over.

When I began to write full-time nine years ago, the change in lifestyle was immediate, exhilarating and complete. Those years were an unexpected (and perhaps undeserved) gift. For it's a privilege to be given an opportunity to play at writing without other distractions (curing patients, selling insurance, or preparing English lectures). I don't say I have been brilliantly successful but I have enjoyed the rhythm of regularly working away at poetry, short stories, reviews, opera libretti, whatever. It is a different way of life from the goal-oriented forces driving the business world. Indeed, for a while I had to keep purging from my mind a sort of "production viewpoint": how many words this week? how many poems submitted? how many published? how many to aim for next week? etc. etc. -- which is not what poetry is about.

Now for a short while (perhaps a year, perhaps two years) I have returned, for economic reasons, to the world of business. Staring at me from my desk is some high-powered computer equipment, quite excessive for the meagre requirements of my poetic word-processing but indispensable for my temporary consulting role. I confess I'm hooked on gigabytes and kilobauds and graphical interfaces and SCSI ("scuzzy") ports and ethernets and LANs and WANs and other exotica of the info world. And while the present work expands to fill 50% more than the time allotted for its completion, I find that once again the writing of poetry has become almost impossible.

So the evidence is conclusive. I just can't manage to do the two things at once. Or even to chew gum too, for that matter.

But you might ask: well even if you can't do both at the same time, do your experiences in the business world provide subject matter for your poetry? Regretfully I have to say: not much. A couple of my poems indulge in light satire about politics, sewers, free-trade, and one-page executive summaries. But it's not my predominant style.

Now, if I could close by referring to the arena that does inspire much of my poetry, it is not my career at all -- but rather: science. Some people find meditation the right way to seek spiritual values. Others prefer philosophy. Others would use another word than spiritual. But it doesn't matter. There's no one right answer. All paths climb to the top of the mountain. But I prefer the scientific one. To me the questions (or koans) posed by science lead the most quickly to a profound sense of awe at the imponderability of our situation. As a result, many of my poems are science-related. And I continue to be an avid, if amateur, science reader: cosmology, quantum mechanics, relativity, chaos theory and all that jazz. But here is the point. It works, at least for me, because science is an avocation . If it were a career, if I were a nuclear physicist (as, indeed, with a different choice of university professor, I might have been), I'm sure I would not have the sense of time and freedom to write science poems. Of course, others can and do. Kim Maltman for one. But I doubt I could.

Profession (any profession) just fights too much, for me, the irresponsibility of writing poetry. I can't figure out the combination. The profession doth profess too much.

So there you have it. Advice from a combinatorial failure. But combine by all means if you can. And then tell me how.

....................................................................Copyright (c) 1991 Rod Anderson

Last updated Jul 7/95

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