Lines of Work

When you read “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” is anything essential gained from the knowledge that Wallace Stevens worked as an executive at an insurance company? Do you need to know that Charles Bukowski was a postal clerk in order to appreciate his books? Or that Frank O’Hara was a museum curator? Or that Anne Sexton was a fashion model and a lingerie saleswoman?

Maybe not—although such biographical details tell us something about the conditions under which the art was created, and the material inspirations behind it.

William Carlos Williams, for example, was a doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey, a career that brought him face-to-face with birth, death, and all the “inarticulate poems” between. As the scholar Linda Wager-Martin wrote, Williams’s work gave him the freedom “to write what he chose, free from any kind of financial or political pressure. From the beginning, he understood the tradeoffs: he would have less time to write; he would need more physical stamina than people with only one occupation.”

Art isn’t created in a vacuum, and with that in mind, the Poetry Foundation invited five contemporary poets to share short essays about their day jobs—the work that’s rarely mentioned alongside lists of publications, fellowships, and awards. We imposed no restrictions; poets were free to say whatever they wanted to about the relationship between labor and creativity. We wanted to understand not only how poets make money—an oft-ignored subject—but also how they make art amid the demands of jobs and family.

 

Arielle Greenberg
Belfast, ME

 

I used to teach poetry to MFA students and to undergrads in Chicago, but due to various life circumstances—including having two children—I ditched my tenured job in 2011 and moved my family to Maine. We live in Belfast, a small town in a rural county. I have no designs on full-time academic work here; I just want to be available to raise my kids while they’re young. I’m sort of known in the poetry community for “dropping out,” of both academia and urban life.

In many ways, my life is less harried now, but it’s also more complicated in terms of paid work. Like most people in this rural place, I juggle various part-time paid jobs in addition to my unpaid creative labor. My primary employment, and the position that determines my schedule (but gives me the flexibility I need for my kids), is a part-time office job: I am a brand strategist and a writer/editor for a small marketing agency. (I also occasionally teach college as an adjunct, and teach and edit one-on-one as a freelancer.) 

In my position at the agency, we track our billable client time by the quarter-hour, and I am paid by the hour. Viewing my time and its direct monetary equivalence has given me a different relationship to my own creative work and how it slots into my life. I see my schedule now in terms of 15-minute increments: that’s how much time I have to vacuum, or get a snack for my kids, or call a friend, or go to the bank, or work on a manuscript. I live and die by my leather-bound datebook, in which I write appointments and deadlines and to-do lists, often months ahead of time. Tasks such as “type up poems” or “reorder manuscript” get their own allotments of 45 minutes, or whatever I can spare (when I can spare it, which isn’t often). Sometimes I go months without “poem-ing” at all. But other times, when I feel great urgency about a project, I find time for it—whether on a layover, or on a weekend, or whatever.

As a poet, I never conceived of my writing in terms of money. But the fact that I’m paid by the hour now, and my paycheck varies week to week, means I’m more aware of how much my time is worth when I take on freelance gigs (such as writing this essay), or even when I volunteer. My time translates into dollars now, and I make decisions about whether it’s valuable to me—monetarily or otherwise—to take on a new task or project by keeping my “going rate” in mind.

Still, I tell my students that the fact that there is no market for poetry in this country is hugely liberating; it means we can create art outside of that system. This aligns my (largely unpaid) creative work with other kinds of nourishing activity outside of capitalist modes of production. But it also relegates it to something that’s “for pleasure” rather than “for work,” which means it’s rarely a priority. I recently read about how the poet Marie Ponsot, who had seven children and paid employment of her own, tried to write for 10 minutes—or even just one line—every day. I may try this, too, but mostly I embrace the idea that I’m happy to spend my “free” time with my family, or traveling, or dancing. I figure that, eventually, when my kids are grown, and maybe there aren’t great convenient jobs available to me, I’ll have time for poetry. Maybe this won’t be until I’m retired. I’m OK with that.   

 

Molly Sutton Kiefer
Frontenac, MN

 

When I hear the phrase “economic hardship” in conjunction with my profession, I don’t immediately think of my own bank account, which is almost always empty, a fact I blame on myself. I still link hardship to places like the back room of the high school where I teach, which is full of shabby volumes, or I think of the rosters that ask me to squeeze in just a few more desks.

I teach Language Arts at a high school in rural Minnesota that serves a growing Latinx and Native American population. This coming school year, I’ll teach an overload, which means I’ll have five preps over the year and teach seven classes each semester. I have to balance my essay assigning carefully, though I expect to have a fresh set in my bag every weekend. My husband and I have negotiated an evening a week that will belong to me. He’ll pick up our six- and eight-year-old from school and take them to lessons. This may or may not end up being my lesson-planning time.

I am an editor and a writer, too, though both of these pursuits cost me more money than they earn. There are submission fees for my own writing, and for the press I run there are conference fees and travel costs. I shift a portion of my paycheck to the business account to help cover printing or design costs. I am OK with this, though I’m aware I’m not supposed to be. If I expect no income, anything that comes my way is a pleasant surprise. Still, I don’t consider either role a hobby. I feel about this work the way I often feel about motherhood: earnest, joyful, exhilarated, exasperated.

Those words could describe how I feel about teaching, too, and now I’ve connected the thread between my various labors, all of which emotionally confound and stir me. These labors make me want to immerse myself in them, write about them, celebrate them. Living with such bright, intense emotional labors causes me to examine the world with a more empathetic eye. It sounds cliché because it is, but that doesn’t make any of it less true.

The problem, I’ve found, is that any of these things—teaching, writing, editing, mothering—is big enough to dedicate your life to, and because of time’s slippery nature, which never allows enough for any one pursuit, I feel less than adequate at all of my labors. I am a passionate person by nature, and I want to do justice to each task. And because I take seriously the consequences my actions have on others’ development, it’s often my writing that lags last. I see the changes in my students and my children as they learn, and my writers as their books go out into the world. I don’t see my own readers as they read something I wrote.

But I’m wily and have discovered ways to double up. Much like the parental advice of napping while the baby naps, I write when my students write, which, if my classroom management doesn’t lag, is a few times a week. Education is chock full of philosophies based on modeling, and I’m glad to enact them. I read with both my kids and me in mind—anthologies of essays by writers whose work I love, for example, which I eventually set aside to write a few lines of my own.

My teaching life and my writing life aren’t about cause and effect, or what inspires what else. It’s closer to symbiosis, or the way a lyric essay unbraids itself on the page. My students, just like my children, sneak into what I write—their voices and their actions—because they are full of wonder, often brilliant, still unpolished, and exactly who they need to be in their lives at this time. I try to remind myself that I’m exactly who I need to be, too, and so is what I write.  

 

Megan Snyder-Camp
Seattle, WA

 

Are you ready to go for a ride? The transport worker always asks exactly those words. It’s 7:30 AM, and I’m about to walk my two older kids to school, seven blocks of rabbits and grackle, and sidewalk snail rescues, and a discreet hug from my oldest. The transport worker, whom I’ve never met and will likely never see again, buckles the child, who I will likely never see again either, into a car seat and loads the bag of clothes into the trunk.

I am the mom of this house. We’ve been doing this—taking one or two emergent night-to-night foster placements each month—for about two years, in addition to a couple of long-term placements, in which a kid joins our family for months, or years, until they are reunified with their family of origin, or adopted.

Every workplace has its own vocabulary that helps you do what has to be done, and in the foster system, our sausage is made with plenty of acronyms and euphemisms for the mechanics of dismantling families: removal, attachment issues, dysregulation, termination of parental rights, partial compliance. Night to night.

I cannot speak aloud the traumas—both gruesome and banal—kids in my care have survived. What I know of their trauma presses at the front of my mind every time I sit to write, but by law I cannot tell it. Which is as it should be: a child’s story is their own. What’s left, what’s safe to tell, must seem odd and disjointed, a bunch of elbows.

Before fostering, I approached poetry of witness with the belief that if you enter a story that isn’t yours, you’d better be as plainspoken as possible, and not hide behind any lyric fern. Even you can be a way of shirking responsibility. Metaphor feels tacky, assumptive, when talking about someone else’s trauma.

When I write about a child in the foster system, I feel a responsibility to document the child being a child—winding their shoelace around a playground woodchip, hiding a figurine under a colander—without always grabbing for the flashlight of trauma. Although the way I parent a child in care is trauma-informed, what I write about that child needs to honor the whole person and not reduce them to a “foster kid.”   

When I first became a mother, 12 years ago, I was also becoming a poet. My children sidle into everything I write, and often physically interrupt my writing. Now that I’m a foster parent, I have three kids, or four, or five, or even six, depending. My writing schedule changes often. Right now, one afternoon a week, I schedule a babysitter for my biological kids (because to have a regular babysitter for a kid in foster care entails a TB test, First Aid/CPR certification, and a cleared background check, which can take months to process) during the window of time when a regular weekly court-ordered parent visit is scheduled. I try to set up layers of backup plans: if the parent visit is canceled or rescheduled, we’ll all go to the Y, where I can use up to 90 minutes of childcare while I work in the lobby. During the school year, when two of my four kids are in school, my mother can often take one child one morning a week, while another goes to a state-certified drop-in daycare for a few hours. But sometimes weeks go by without me writing. When that happens, I try to make use of the not writing.

The constraint of waiting to write can be a way to modulate the heat of my attention, or to offer a necessary gentleness for these poems. “Hurry kills love” is a phrase I heard at foster parent training a couple of years ago, and it’s a phrase that guides my writing. I don’t want to write full-blast, filling pages and pages. I try to practice a purposeful storing-up over the week, reading at night when I can, starting a poem in my head and letting it fade, and then, when I finally sit to write, the thing I have been working toward hopefully has enough of its own momentum that it doesn’t burn under the earnestness of what I want to say—or what I know I can’t say.

Since becoming a foster parent, I have had to change my language structurally and grammatically. I require more openness in the phrases I use, more space for all of us. I hunger for language that fully fits the changing nature of family, words that cover us and allow us to claim a place within our community, without disclosing the confidential fact that some of our kids might be in foster care, and without erasing, or past-tensing, the primary connection these kids have to the families they were born into. I resist the invention of new language for this; what we are doing is not new. But the words I once used to talk about my family, back in the day when my family was composed only of people who were simply mine, feel like shrunken laundry now, leaving us partially uncovered. Ours is a family that changes. Words that sometimes fit: adjacency, expansion, alongsidedness, fluidity, unspoken loss, shimmering difference. I am searching for the word that means mother not mother.

 

Kenning Jean-Paul García
Albany, NY

 

It was never my goal to do what I do. Things happen, and that’s that for a while. Life is lived day-to-day, day by day, a day at time, and we can’t escape that. My everyday life is more about every night. What the day brings, the night undoes. What the day breaks, the night fixes. Whatever one is the other opposes, complements, or completes. Sometimes. Maybe.

I work nights at the largest Walmart in America. I’m a maintenance worker. I sweep, mop, collect trash from in and around the building, and I wax floors. I am known for doing detail work. Essentially, though, I spend 32 hours each week between 10 PM and 7 AM looking, observing, seeing, regarding.

When I started this job 11 years ago, I was working on my linguistics degree, and translation and morphology are also about details. I can’t get away from details. But this job is all about visual details, and I’m not a fan of sight, if that makes sense. I never much cared about visual art. I’m a listener and a daydreamer. Focusing isn’t really for me, so I’m always trying to find room to daydream, to remember, and to think or rethink.

Writing is thinking. I try to think myself away from the sights on hand such as stickers stuck to tile floors, cans and bottles that have rolled under shelves, cat litter and dog food that has spilled all over the floor, and lots of gum. I try to focus on what’s in my headphones, or in my memories, or in the conversations in the air around me. I distract myself from the dirt.

I create series of jokes, memes, lists, and short-form lyric essays based on everyday language around me, and I drag an idea out as long as it can go. Once a thought gets in my head, I work on it for nights on end. I am sparse in description but long-winded. I fight against details and images. I don’t want my writing to be what my work is. Details that were important in the moment of cleaning don’t mean much once they’re cleaned up. What happened in one aisle will occur in another tomorrow, and none of it matters as long as it’s gone before the day is over. I erase the momentary and try to retain the perpetual, the habitual.

The everyday is always more of the same—except when it’s not. It’s my job to explore the “not” both in cleaning and in writing. The details I retain in my writing are the exceptions. The stains that won’t come out. The debris that refuses to be cleaned up.

This work gets me stuck in my head. I face myself to not face the floor. Sometimes I do working meditations, other times I pine, and sometimes I brood. From these moments come the cognitive writing and antipoetics that I do. I want to retain moods and sentiments over sight-oriented sensations. There’s not much to see at my job but there’s lots to remember, lots to hear, lots to feel. I let sadness and anger shift and become lines that I tell myself again and again until I go to break and decide whether these thoughts should be posted to Twitter or Instagram or saved in Notepad on my phone. I compare my work emotions to my out-of-work emotions, and to my larger feelings about the world. I examine degrees of disappointment. I give up daily.

 

Jonathan Mendoza
Chicago, IL

 

I work as a grassroots community organizer in Chicago, focusing primarily on housing justice and youth power. The role is less about providing a service—such as affordable apartments or health care—to alleviate an oppression than it is about helping communities target, transform, and dismantle the systems and institutions that create and sustain these oppressions.

Lately, every day seems to unveil a new crisis: luxury condominiums appear where community centers once stood; schools approach the chopping block as working-class families are pushed out of the neighborhood. National politics only compound local issues, as immigrants who fear losing their low-cost housing also dread increased persecution from the White House. Our instinct here has been to attend to every problem that emerges, to put out every fire. While the aim may be virtuous, it is not sustainable. 

I am often asked, whether as an organizer or as an artist, about the source of my hope—hope that might drive me to persevere through endless battles and tragic defeats. The question is based on the presumption that I have hope to begin with. 

I recently attended an event at which Janna Jihad, a 13-year-old Palestinian activist and the youngest certified journalist in the world, recounted words frequently uttered in the Palestinian liberation movement: “Palestine will be free.” The statement was not the more common: “Free Palestine.” It was not a plea; it was not a demand. It was a prophecy. If I am to have hope for, and belief in, a future where we are all free, it is because young people do.

Organizing is not solely the external labor of trainings and protests, but the internal work of healing and finding ways and reasons to remain in a world brimming with despair. I find hope in our youth program’s laughter during lunchtime; in our dropped-jaw revelations while studying the anatomies of mass movements. I find hope in the art we share, in the reflections we discuss, in the chants and poetry of ancestors we read aloud. 

My poetry and my organizing are continuously in dialogue, a symbiotic exchange between teaching artist workshops and activist trainings, rally speeches, and spoken word performances. All of the tools, games, and exercises I learn and apply through teaching artistry—tools that foster comfort, trust, and creativity in classrooms—are the same ones I use, with the same intention, when facilitating community meetings and trainings. Likewise, the frameworks I employ to address root causes of problems as an organizer are the exact approaches I use as a poet when articulating what I believe are critical messages not communicated by mass media. 

Poetry is, in essence, a method of creating our own media. At times, I write in a spontaneous emotional moment, often late in the evening, and often in reaction to an occurrence in my community or in the world that’s so dire, or so complex, that to contain it without catharsis would be emotionally and physically debilitating. Other times, only the idea for a poem will spawn from such an occurrence. Ideas also come from other works of art, or from my growing frustration with news and social media that continue to mischaracterize a grave oppression. The idea will crystallize over weeks or months of research. I will stitch lines and stanzas together, much like I’m creating and editing a documentary film or a news story.

I first began performing and writing nearly eight years ago, when I was 17, as a way to craft and perform the message of my organizing. I am beginning to believe that activism is just art with next steps. Labor Day was at least partially established in response to state fear of working-class solidarity during May Day. Millions of workers enduring 12- to 16-hour days under dangerous conditions gathered to demand—to violent ends—what privileged groups now experience as the eight-hour workday and “the weekend.” People had to craft and perform a message for those victories to occur.

If my poetry doesn’t reach the people for whom it was written, then I have failed. I don’t create for journals or literary enthusiasts, or to be lifted into the halls of academia. I create for the people I need to be in conversation with: for the family evicted, for the friend deported, for the communities I love, and for the young activist-artist persevering in a burning world. It is the only way I can believe what I have sworn to tell them: soon, we will all be free.

 

Co-published with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project