Joseph Brodsky declared to his students that there are “two areas to which democracy does not apply: one, the sciences because that would equate knowledge with ignorance, and two, the arts, because that would equate masterpieces with garbage.” As I recall, Brodsky did not take it any further, but there are differences between how we regard the sciences and the arts. We don’t encourage everyone to be scientists, although many people have jobs in the sciences and in their application. But, we do encourage everyday citizens to involve themselves in the arts. There are countless classes offered where students are taught the basics of how to play a recorder or a piano, how to paint or sculpt, or how to write poetry or fiction.
Most of these students will not devote full time to their art. Still, they will use the skills they’ve learned to make their lives better, to express thoughts and feelings, to give body to their perceptions. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. We could even say it’s one of the goals of a healthy society. However, it does bring up a question for us: what does it mean to be a professional in the arts at a time when only the smallest fraction of artists will make a living from the practice of their art? I can only speak to poetry, which I have written most of my life and which I’ve published in several books. As much as I might want to think of myself as a professional poet, I’m not sure that I can because the dividing lines are so blurry.
If this is a problem, it is one of our own making. Every day, thousands of our fellow human beings take writing classes. For more than nine years, I’ve taught a weekly poetry workshop in various Florida prisons, and many of my students have gone on to publish in anthologies and magazines. One of my prison students and I ended up with ghazals in the same issue of the same journal, and his was probably the better ghazal. These students—and many others—have written fine poems that allow readers insight into experiences that are important for the rest of us to know. I don’t think anyone doubts that writing students can prove excellent poets. What then does it mean to be a “professional poet”?
While the poets who are chosen as national poet laureates or who receive a major grant may have a year or so free of financial worries, these awards are not large by the standards of sports, business, or more popular art forms. Most poets make their livelihood doing something else. They are teachers, doctors, lawyers, psychologists, or entrepreneurs. Often, they work in fields where they care for disabled people or do other difficult jobs that require thought, attention, and emotional connection. This is quite different from other areas of human life. To say that someone is an amateur physician or amateur attorney is a joke. Professions are usually regulated and well defined, and those who have a professional practice of anything most often use that practice to pay their rent and put food on the table. Poetry is different.
Whatever the dividing line is between professional poets and amateurs, it is not financial. Poetry does not pay the bills. As it happens though, there are other distinctions. The term “profession” is sometimes distinguished from the practice of trades, services, and exchanges by the idea that those who engage in a profession have higher obligations than making money. They want to make society a better place by what they do. I’m not sure this works for poets because the worst examples of poetry are those where the poet has extra-poetic goals, such as preaching a faith or advocating a political position. The way poets improve lives is by exposing readers to someone else’s inner self and inner conflicts. This is not an edifying process. In poetry, we encounter all sorts of states of being and emotions, especially unpleasant ones, ones we would rather not admit into our consciousnesses. While confronting those mental states can be painful, the usefulness of the practice has been endorsed by everyone from Aristotle to Thomas Hardy. As far as I can tell, the value of what poetry gives us is well established, and there isn’t anything new to add.
At the same time, it seems central to the work of poets who offer these experiences that their purpose is personal. They make these poems for themselves, and if others read them and are troubled or moved, so much the better. Good lyric poets generally understand that their job is to embody in words their own experiences. If that job has been done well, other people will be able to participate in those embodied experiences and enlarge their own worlds. Perhaps in this context, “professional” means someone who is devoted to this process of getting something said. When we serve that poetic process as opposed to tallying reactions on social media, we are professing poetry.
One of the most perplexing aspects of our profession, though, is that poetry is not a matter of will or merit. Good poets may be dreadful human beings. History is full of deplorable poets, who left behind poems of great immediacy and power. Sometimes, those poems contained the worst of their author’s beliefs. Great examples of poetry, the masterpieces Brodsky refenced, do not come into existence because their poets are noble souls. Noble souls may spend their lives writing bad poems, poems that never really allow their readers to enter the separate universe of another person. Skillful poets may write perfect meters and artful rhymes or even elegant free verse, and the poems may go nowhere. We may read them and move on, unaffected. A professional poet does not necessarily produce masterpieces, while a less-devoted poet may produce a poem we find stunning. A professional poet recognizes this, understands that the practice of poetry may be futile, and that the poet, like Kafka’s petitioner in “Before the Law,” may spend a lifetime waiting without result. Maybe, the distinction is that the professional poet persists.