Many, many years ago, I got an MFA in poetry writing. At the time, I had visions of the kind of career most naive young writers would like to have: grad school, first book published before I turned thirty which wins prestigious award, poems appear in swanky journals, fly to New York to collect said prestigious award, tenure track job at leafy college with worshipful students, etc.
This is not how things worked out. Instead, after completing grad school I worked in a bookstore, adjunct taught composition at three different schools at once, ran an independent magazine, and got my own work rejected from hundreds of literary magazines. Eventually, I did get the first book of poetry, but it took almost a decade after graduation, and it didn’t win any awards. In fact, only recently — almost two years after it was published — did it even get a second review. Eventually, I also got a full-time academic job, but it’s not tenure track and it’s not at a leafy college with worshipful students — it’s a lecturer gig in comp and research writing at a cash poor public research university with nearly forty thousand students, most of whom do not worship any of their professors. They are far too pragmatic for that.
Eventually, I turned to nonfiction writing, because poetry started to feel claustrophobic. The same people seemed to always be publishing in the same places, going to the same events, talking about one another’s work in the same ways. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy writing, doing readings, or getting published, just that I got to a point where I needed something different. Ergo, prose. Also I started to love social science, research, interviewing people… things you don’t do for poetry.
Last weekend, I did my first poetry reading in over a year, and while it felt awesome to crack out some new work (I’ve just begun to write poems again after nearly a two year hiatus), it also felt bittersweet. Like the life I would have had was there, in that room. The life that’s all about poetry, writing it, reading it, running a press, and so on. I have lots of friends whose lives revolve around poetry, and I kind of envy them the rewards they get from it, and the closeness of the poetry scene. At AWP, you can run around a conference with ten thousand people there and actually know a fair number of them. When you do research writing, you open yourself up to new communities, new groups of people, new ways of working. You’re in the library, on the phone, doing field work, sending emails, fact checking, transcribing. You’re on the computer for hours and hours straight rather than sitting down for a few minutes, getting some lines down, getting up, having a drink, writing a few more lines, etc (at least this is how I write poetry, except the drink is tea or coffee). I’ve never been to a writer’s retreat or a writer’s colony or that kind of deal, but I imagine it’s kind of the opposite of what I’m describing here: total isolation versus total immersion. Different means to an end.
One of the things I hope to figure out some day is whether or not it’s possible to balance both successfully. When I try to think of writers who write really well in two genres I run seriously short of examples. Maybe fiction and nonfiction, yeah, but poetry and fiction? Or poetry and nonfiction? Or something else where both the method and end products are so diametrically opposed?