Tag Archives: poets

How Artists are Poor

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Visual artists, poets– NPR thinks you do it for the love, because as its new series on how artists make a living reveals, you’re not doing it for the money. Revelation, huh?
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What the articles explore is the myriad ways artists support themselves while pursuing their craft. While it is mildly interesting to hear about how different people make money (teaching is a big one), nowhere does it question how difficult it is to make a living in the arts. I believe artists create something of great value for the world, and yet that value is less than often paid back to the artist in dollars that amount to a good living. Partly it’s difficult to assign a dollar value to a work of art.
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But we also have a value system in which the arts seem expendable, like dessert. It’s pleasant, but it’s not meat and potatoes. And the stereotypical ‘starving artist’ doesn’t even get potatoes. While its true you can’t eat a painting or a novel, I rather think- to continue an overextended metaphor- we eat too much, and look and read too little. This leaves artists in rather a tough situation, like this one…

On the other hand, you can’t eat a painting. What do you think?

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Vanished Poet Rosemary Tonks

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Rosemary Tonks, like the name Blinky Palermo, is a name I wish I had, or at least had invented. Tonks isn’t the familiar name it once was, when the bearer was a promising writer in London in the 1960s. Now her name echoes like the ghost she has become of her own life. (It’s a rather ungainly thud of an echo, but still.)

Tonks wrote two slim volumes of verse that you’d be hard pressed to find copies of. They are out of print and will not be republished. The author has forbidden her publisher to reprint it. Her writing reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s in its tone and themes, but with a much updated form and sensibility.

Tonks now lives (the rumours go) in a shack in a garden in the countryside, where she accepts no visitors and she does not write. It’s been so for 30+ years. There are rumours that she joined a Christian cult, which you might imagine from some of her writing was a major life change. This spirituality forbids her to write, and is given as the reason why she will not allow her work to be reprinted. Her struggle reminds me of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s struggle between his work as a priest and his passion for writing. I worship art more than anything, and I only wish we had more from both authors. Born in 1932, she’s seems on course to die as much of a mystery as she is now.


But I salvaged a poem for you here, from The Iliad of Broken Verses. It’s something I quite enjoyed reading, and if you like, I can send you more.

Actually, I decided to include a second that I also liked very much.

THE SOFAS, FOGS, AND CINEMAS

I have lived it , and lived it,
My nervous, luxury civilization,
My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.

…Their idea of literature is hopeless.
Make them drink their own poetry!
Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.

It’s quiet; just the fresh, chilly weather…and he
Gets up from his dead bedroom, and comes in here
And digs himself into the sofa.
He stays there up to two hours in the hole – and talks
— Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to everything
It’s……damnably depressing.
(That great lavatory coat…the cigarillo burning
In the little dish…And when he calls out: “Ha!”
Madness! – you no longer possess your own furniture.)

On my bad days (and I’m being broken
At this very moment) I speak of my ambitions…and he
Becomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,
Morose, sour, mouldering away, with lockjaw….

I grow coaser: and more modern (I, who am driven mad
By my ideas; who go nowhere;
Who dare not leave my frontdoor, lest an idea…)
All right. I admit everything, everything!

Oh yes, the opera (Ah, but the cinema)
He particularly enjoys it, enjoys it horribly, when someone’s ill
At the last minute; and they specially fly in
A new, gigantic, Dutch soprano. He wants to help her
With her arias. Old goat! Blasphemer!
He wants to help her with her arias!

No, I…go to the cinema,
I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum,
…the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,
The screen is spread out like a thundercloud – that bangs
And splashes you with acid…or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,
And in the silence, drips and crackles – taciturn, luxurious.
…The drugged and battered Philistines
Are all around you in the auditorium…

And he…is somewhere else, in his dead bedroom clothes,
He wants to make me think his thoughts
And they will be enormous, dull – (just the sort
To kep away from).
…when I see that cigarillo, when I see it…smoking
And he wants to face the international situation…
Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!

— All this sitting about in cafés to calm down
Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature!
The idiotic cut of stanzas; the novels, full up, gross.

I have lived it, and I know too much.
My café-nerves are breaking me
With black, exhausting information.

Story Of A Hotel Room

Thinking we were safe-insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom…
…And who does not know that pair of shutters
With all the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests-just guests of one another’s senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit…
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
-If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

Absinthe as a Lifestyle: Rimbaud and other French Decadents

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“For me, my glory is but a humble ephemeral absinthe drunk on the sly, with fear of treason and if I drink no longer, it is for good reason!” – Paul Verlaine

“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, which is the most horrible thing in the world.” – Oscar Wilde
In addition to Van Gogh, famous absinthe drinkers (make that addicts) include the French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine. A new book by Edmund White, Rimbaud, highlights the affair and drinking habits of these two poet maudits, and the Time’s review of it gives you condensed insight into the poet’s embroiled lives. Rimbaud, left,
“cultivated the lice in his hair and tried to make them jump onto other people; he smashed up heirlooms; he sold his hosts’ furniture to buy gallons of booze, especially absinthe, on which he would proceed to get blotto, waking up in pools of his own merde (one of his favourite words). Finally, he seduced Verlaine, made him abandon his wife and infant child, and led the poor sap off on a sordid set of adventures that culminated, a couple of years later, with an exasperated Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in the wrist and serving a term in prison.”
Also from Parisian society of the time–called Decadent with good reason–we have Edgar Degas’s L’absithe. Intersetingly, the French had no illusions about absinthe’s addictive nature, but rather seem drawn to and fascinated by sin. Absinthe at that time was like heroin chic of the 90s. So despite my earlier denunciation, I can see now where all the cultural stigma, and thus its sinful appeal, stems from. Absinthe was a lifestyle.