So I realised that for a blog called Married to a Poet, I don't really write that much about the whole being married to a poet thing. For all I know, you're thinking about spending a fairly big proportion of your life with a poet too and you've stumbled here in search of tips and experience.
Not sure I have much to offer there, unless your poet is like mine - not recognisably a stereotypical poet i.e. not fey or sentimental. He's not a performance poet by the popular definition of the word which seems to equate pretty well with 'rapper'. But he is an incredible performer (he co-founded a group called Shadowork, who create amazing voice soundscapes) and he writes damn good poetry. He has published about seven books, two of which have sold out and one is in a second print. Oh, and he was a physicist first. And yet not geeky either. Come to think of it, he is all about not conforming to stereotype.
Anyway, here are some musings about poetry from a poet wife's perspective.
1. The poetry world, in the UK at least, is rather political, and it does increasingly seem who you know rather than the quality of your work that gets you readings and festival appearances and residencies and sometimes even published. This is a big frustration that you will probably come to share and wish you could blog about.
2. You cannot make a living by writing and publishing poetry alone. Maybe someone like Seamus Heaney can, or the few poets in the curious higher echelons who are at every festival, have agents and command high fees, but your average pretty successful poet is going to need a day job, or at least do a lot of freelance work. Teaching is popular, and there is an ever-growing hungry adult student body for creative writing classes and workshops (witness the rise of the creative writing MA in the UK) as well as all those kids in schools. Getting work on BBC radio is good, because they pay per minute.
3. If you write poetry yourself, and you become intimate with another poet, you may just feel the desire to start working in another genre if your loved one's mastery of the art makes you wonder why you bother. Or maybe that's just me.
4. You may arrive home from work, or return from being in another room to find a poem or several awaiting your audience. You may get a phone call which is a poem. You may surprise yourself at just how usefully critical your reading of poetry becomes.
5. You may find yourself reading poems written before the poet met you, and wishing they were written for you, or just that you had been around to give him/her a hug.
Like this one.
Not sure I have much to offer there, unless your poet is like mine - not recognisably a stereotypical poet i.e. not fey or sentimental. He's not a performance poet by the popular definition of the word which seems to equate pretty well with 'rapper'. But he is an incredible performer (he co-founded a group called Shadowork, who create amazing voice soundscapes) and he writes damn good poetry. He has published about seven books, two of which have sold out and one is in a second print. Oh, and he was a physicist first. And yet not geeky either. Come to think of it, he is all about not conforming to stereotype.
Anyway, here are some musings about poetry from a poet wife's perspective.
1. The poetry world, in the UK at least, is rather political, and it does increasingly seem who you know rather than the quality of your work that gets you readings and festival appearances and residencies and sometimes even published. This is a big frustration that you will probably come to share and wish you could blog about.
2. You cannot make a living by writing and publishing poetry alone. Maybe someone like Seamus Heaney can, or the few poets in the curious higher echelons who are at every festival, have agents and command high fees, but your average pretty successful poet is going to need a day job, or at least do a lot of freelance work. Teaching is popular, and there is an ever-growing hungry adult student body for creative writing classes and workshops (witness the rise of the creative writing MA in the UK) as well as all those kids in schools. Getting work on BBC radio is good, because they pay per minute.
3. If you write poetry yourself, and you become intimate with another poet, you may just feel the desire to start working in another genre if your loved one's mastery of the art makes you wonder why you bother. Or maybe that's just me.
4. You may arrive home from work, or return from being in another room to find a poem or several awaiting your audience. You may get a phone call which is a poem. You may surprise yourself at just how usefully critical your reading of poetry becomes.
5. You may find yourself reading poems written before the poet met you, and wishing they were written for you, or just that you had been around to give him/her a hug.
Like this one.
IF YOU WERE TO COME BACK
I'd stand at the door like one bereaved:
Then I'd draw you in by both hands
Aghast and breathless,
With silence stretched between us
For a second
Before it snapped -
And my heart burst its banks
In belief.
I'd kiss you on the mouth, on the face
Wear out your name
with soft saying
I'd kiss you more than you would want
Until you'd have to draw back, breathless
As one wounded
To try to speak, to tell me
Why it was you came.
