Vocation, Vocation, Vocation

'Shortly before the recent Forward prizes for poetry were awarded, I was rung up by a journalist who was trying to talk to all the poets on the shortlist for best collection. She asked me why so few young people considered poetry as a career, and whether I had anything to say to those who might have it in mind. This struck me as a strange and original approach, and I replied with a laugh that poetry was more like an affliction than a career. As luck would have it, I was among the prizewinners, and the next day the Independent ran a piece headlined: "This is no way to earn a living, says prize-winning poet." '

'Poetry is an imaginative necessity for the poet, for good or ill. It provides many of the writer's greatest joys, but writing poetry is often very difficult and frustrating, while not writing it can be intolerable, and not only for the poet. Whether a poet is writing or not, a good deal of his or her time is likely to be taken up with thinking about it, remembering poems, examining rhythms, finding a way in to the next poem. In blank patches nothing you have learned seems of any help: it's as though you have woken up in a world that no longer speaks your language. Something comparable, I imagine, holds true for those working in any art form. Hence my use of the word "affliction": you have to laugh at a situation in which your work is involuntary but where, equally, you have no grounds for complaint. It's a bind of almost theological neatness.'

'Poetry is a vocation: it possesses you. So the choices are either: write poetry or go mad, or: write poetry and go mad. The attrition rate among poets is high, and even given the vocation there is no guarantee that any of what you write will prove to be good or durable. As TS Eliot said, you may have messed up your life for nothing.'

'Isn't there a danger, some might ask, of taking yourself too seriously? Fortunately, a system of checks and balances operates, guided as though by an invisible hand. For example, only last week this very newspaper represented my collection The Drowned Book, which the Forward judges described as "heart-wrenching", by reprinting a comic poem called "Drains". No danger at all, thank heaven.'

Excerpts taken from Sean O Brien's article in Review: Saturday Guardian 13.10.07
http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2189790,00.html