Career Advice for Young Poets

Is there such a thing as career advice for poets? I’m reading The 6.5 Habits of Moderately Effective Poets by Jeffrey Skinner and wondering if there is such a thing as useful advice for young poets. What could I at 39 have told myself at 25 that would be helpful? One professor at that age told me not to go into debt to get an MFA; in general, good advice for most, but if I had followed that advice, I just would never have gotten an MFA, because low-res programs, while more flexible for folks with families/jobs/health issues/people who live in isolated areas – in short, for everyone is who isn’t a single 25 year old unemployed person ready to move across country for the right scholarship – they aren’t cheap and definitely most of them aren’t fully funded. Was it worth it for me to get that degree, to get to work with great writers, to force myself to think of myself as “a writer” again after years as a corporate middle manager? Sure, I now have some student loans to worry about, and you know what? I have never made the kind of money as a poet, freelance writer, adjunct, or government-sponsored-arts-contractor (which I think my current position might fall under the heading of) that I did as a corporate middle manager that might enable me to make student loan payments easily. I don’t think the answer is straight-forward. A young female college student at my reading asked me about how to “be a poet,” how to “get published.” I mean, where, these days, do we start? I usually tell young people – or older people new to writing – to start with The Poet’s Market, where I started when I was nineteen, to read all about “the poetry business stuff” – writing cover letters, researching the literary magazines before you send to them, trying to get a local group of writers together to critique each other’s work and encourage each other. I tell the to read other poets, to read contemporary poetry especially people their own age, to read the people winning the Pulitzer prizes, to read the writers publishing around them. But what really can you tell someone just starting out? Would I tell myself at 25 to forget about it, that the work is mostly hard and lonely and unrewarding in the deepest possible sort of ways sometimes, that the audiences for poetry are sometimes hard to find, that being a poet is sort of like being a maker of medieval armor, in that there are very few specialists around to appreciate it even when your work is good? That a lot of the work is writing when no one tells you to and stuffing your work into envelopes (or submitting via online databases, somehow even more dehumanizing) and sending it out knowing that most of it will come back with barely any kind of acknowledgement? How to keep going in the face of that? That writing a book of poetry is hard work, that publishing a book of poetry is even harder work and that selling a book of poetry is harder still. This is not exactly sounding like an Oprah-esque you can do it speech, is it? You can always self-publish, I tell people, it’s getting easier every day. I don’t know what the answer is. What would you tell your imaginary 25-year-old self about being a poet? Writing is its own reward? Revising is as important as inspiration? That publishing is as much about persistence as it is about anything else?

Oh yes, and the most important thing: be yourself, for God’s sake. Embrace your own weird self and celebrate it. Write the way you talk, think in your poems the way you think inside your head, and display your own soul because that way, someone else might pick it up and say, “This is exactly how I feel.” You never know. And at least you won’t be derivative. As an editor, I would much rather read poems about driving a big rig or your enthusiasm about playing D&D or your interesting collection of spiders than another poem about a New England barn in the snow. Unless you grew up in a New England barn in the snow, in which case, I probably have very little in common with you anyhow. 

I think now that some advice might have sped things up for me – someone to tell me, for instance, about the different schools of aesthetics for poetry, how Fence was different than Prairie Schooner and what the heck was the school of Quietude compared to Flarf, how poets from New York might differ from poets in LA, to patiently explain that sometimes a helpful rejection note from a good journal is better than an acceptance from a mediocre one, not to rush or worry too much, to just write and do the work, that some magazines are a waste of time because they are only publishing their friends – a closed system – and which ones those were. One really useful thing was a group of friends I used to have that brought in literary magazines I had never heard of and printed out sheets about obscure grant opportunities that we would share and discuss. The blog world of poets – almost eight or nine years ago – was tremendously helpful, as poets then would share the minutia of their lives – the way Kim Addonzio fumed about a bad review or Aimee Nezhukumatathil posted about her little dog or how Paul Guest searched for a job or Eduardo Corral wondered whether he should hold out for certain contests for another year – see what you guys missed out on before those guys got famous and blogs were left behind? About so-and-so’s NEA application woes and so-and-so’s trip to Yaddo or Macdowell. You would learn all kinds of things, you could share the same kinds of rarified weird problems. It was a different kind of world than the one-sentence brevity of Facebook or twitter. So I’m hoping this post might be helpful to someone just starting out, that people might comment with the most helpful advice they had as young writers, that we could reach out to a real community and provide some kind of springboard for new poets.