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Literary head-butting! Norman Mailer discusses head butting Gore Vidal, at about 8:00 into this:
Yes, and he bit Bruce Jay Friedman's shoulder, after Friedman had knocked him down, in a fight that Mailer started.
I didn't know about that one.
I think there's an episode of Cavett where he actually goes a round with a real boxer (pulling punches, of course).
How did so many people make a living as poets. Seems like an absolute luxury.
Hardly anyone makes a living as a poet, unless you count a few songwriters. American academia has employed a lot of poets. Otherwise: T.S. Eliot spent much of his life working for a publisher, Faber & Faber; William Carlos Williams was a physician; Philip Larkin was a librarian at an English university; St. John Perse was a diplomat; I think Walt Whitman worked as a printer for a while.
Saint-John Perse famously wrote little poetry as a diplomat. Except for his stint in China, his diplomatic career involved an intentional turning away from poetry. What allowed him to return to poetry, in exile in the USA, was a Library of Congress consultant position created for him that was mostly a sinecure. Indeed, few make a living from poetry, but a sinecure has historically been the most that a poet could hope for.
Also, Perse had rich and powerful friends and lovers in the USA, which allowed him to enjoy countryside retreats and fine dining beyond what that LoC position could have allowed him. Easier to be a poet when one's needs are amply met and one can work in peace.
For some years before the US had a Poet Laureate, the equivalent honor was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. I know Randall Jarrell held the position for a year (whence, I suppose "The Woman at the Washington Zoo"), and I must have known of others.
I was not aware of the effect of his diplomatic career on his output...
Perse wasn't that consultant, but rather a special position as a consultant in French literature was created for him.
That Perse abandoned poetry after the publication of Anabase, because he felt it would conflict with his career as a diplomat, is a cornerstone of any biography of the poet.
And yet Wallace Stevens wrote while serving as an executive at an insurance company.
And in music, the most famous example, Philip Glass the dishwasher repairman
Joke I assume? Unless there's a Philip Glass the adult-films actor.
“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://improvisedlife.com/2014/06/11/phillip-glass-world-re...
Whitman was a full-time journalist for many years, both at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and elsewhere.
Why? It seems no different than actors or musicians. Maybe they didn't make a living and 'just got by'.
While we're on HN I ask the same question about software engineers. How did (do) so many people make a living producing Twitter or Facebook? If that isn't luxury I don't know what is.
If I had to choose, I think I'd rather live in a world full of poets than software engineers.
Because they deliver a product for advertisers to use, and those pay top dollar.
Poets as a social gain I can see, but in terms of the financial gain? Not so clear.
One could make the claim that they create artistic spaces that turn crime-ridden areas into havens of expression, which bankers then seem to value and then buy houses in (whereby the cycle begins anew until the city is fully gentrified)
The simplest summary I can pull out of my head is... big companies pay them big money to put big ads between the content, at so great a margin that all the excess profit goes towards searching for the next means of striking it rich. Now you
Big companies are missing a trick. They could pay for product placement in poems.
I hate the idea. But they could.
> It seems no different than actors or musicians
Most actors and musicians don't make a living doing those things, either.
> If I had to choose, I think I'd rather live in a world full of poets than software engineers.
Absolutely. It's not even close.
Very nearly no poets ever made a living as poets. Most artists never made a living as artists, either.
As an artist friend of mine once said: nobody chooses to be an artist. You become an artist because there's something inside you that will drive you crazy if you don't get it out.
Not everyone has to make a living. The arts are full of recipients of multi-generational wealth that affords them a lifestyle committed to their work. Mind you, this doesn't take a massive fortune: an inheritance of a couple million could last someone a very long time if they're living like a starving artist. Most noteworthy artists have a backstory like this.
But in the off chance that an artist's work becomes noteworthy, suddenly commissions, publishing deals, professorships, etc. become viable vocations.
"Most" might be an exaggeration. There is Emily Dickinson -- who else?
From Google's "Famous painters" list:
+ Picasso's family was Spanish nobility, with his father also a painter
+ van Gogh's father was an art dealer
+ Monet's father owned a ship supply retailer
+ Rembrandt's father was a miller, but was described as "well-to-do" on their wikipedia page
+ Dali's father was a lawyer
+ Kahlo's father was a photographer (in the 19th century) and was university educated
- Pollock was from relatively humble family background.
"Famous Poets":
+ Dickinson, as you already pointed out,
+ Frost's father was a newspaper editor is San Fransisco and failed politician
+ Poe's parents were successful actors
+ Langston Hughes' father was a member of "the elite, politically active Langston family", though as the grandchild of slaves was hardly born with a silver spoon
+ Sylvia Plath's father was a professor
+ Elizabeth Barrett's family were Caribbean plantation owners
+ Shakespeare's father owned a successful glover's business
- Whitman's family was previously wealthy, but it got lost due to bad investments
- Pablo Neruda was from a working class family in Chile
Meanwhile, Charles Bukowski was born piss poor and was just happy to be able to afford his next drink working as a postman. And you can tell from his books!
You can look up most of the names mentioned and see that they had day jobs in academia or jounalism.