This reminds me of a book I recently enjoyed: <i>Lost in the Cosmos: the Last Self Help Book</i> by novelist Walker Percy. One of his best questions was on "the problem of re-entry", i.e. how does one go from plumbing the very depths of existence/meaning back to the mundane of standing in line to buy groceries. How does one "re-enter" "normal life"? The book doesn't so much as answer the question as make the reader ponder it, but it does have an interlude on writers and their propensity toward alcohol (which, given his career as a novelist, one could say he has valid insight into).<p><i>WARNING: personal, non-verifiable theory about to be presented</i><p>When coming across modern writers I will often check their biography to see what odd-jobs they have had. I feel that modern man can become so insulated in modern life (e.g. spending an entire career in academia with, say, no hobbies that are grounded in actual life such as fishing, serious gardening, etc) that he can become very disconnected and overly "heady" or "abstract". As such, I often am glad to see when an artist or writer has some terribly mundane and tactile job on their resume. I know that as somebody drawn to the arts I have been incredibly thankful for my unplanned career in software as it has opened my eyes to many naive thoughts I had as to "how the world works".
A modern example is Dana Gioia, who switched from poetry grad school to business school, did that for ~15 years, and eventually went back to full-time writing, chaired the NEA, and is I think the current poet laureate ot California. Here's a bit from an interview, about his time working at Jell-O, that weaves this together [1]:<p>> Every day for a year a group of us would meet after lunch and try every recipe ever devised for Jell-O. They were all elaborate and time-consuming. Finally we happened upon a recipe for small slices of concentrated Jell-O that you could pick up with your fingers. I had all the men on the team make them with me. We figured if we could make them, anyone could. We added the idea of shapes and negotiated with Bill Cosby to advertise them. Every box in the U.S. sold off the shelves. My job at the National Endowment for the Arts is oddly similar: to understand how to take all the agency’s resources and, in addition to everything else we’re doing, come up with a few ideas that are transformative.<p>And more relevant to this thread:<p>> I would tell young poets worried about struggling to make a living at their craft to consider alternatives in business before launching an academic career. A poet always struggles. If you work in business, you have the freedom to choose the ring you struggle in. There are many jobs in which a creative person who can write excels. An N.E.A. grant can be a watershed in a writer’s career. It’s the first time some people can write full time. The grant is financial, but also validating. Honor can be even more valuable than money to artists. It gives them the right to take their artistic vocation more seriously.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/jobs/28boss.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/jobs/28boss.html</a>
Philip Glass, the composer, supported himself throughout his life as a cab driver and a plumber. There's a great story of him installing a dishwasher for the art critic of Time magazine.
There is also a group of poets who do live off their poetry, though many are more known by other terms such as "singer-songwriter", "rapper", etc
This reminds me of Steven Pressfield's works. The professional does what they need to do to complete the work. Once the work is done, they being to allocate for the next one.
“While [Langston] Hughes was working at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., he saw poet Vachel Lindsay dining in the restaurant. Hughes slipped three poems under Lindsay’s plate, including his now-famous “The Weary Blues.” Impressed, Lindsay called for the busboy and asked who wrote the poems, and Hughes responded that he did. Lindsay read Hughes’s poems at a public performance that night and introduced him to publishers. The next day, a local newspaper ran an article about the “Negro busboy poet,” and reporters and diners flocked to meet him. The next year, Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues.”
I have not been myself, but there is an exhibition currently at The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University called "Day Jobs":<p><a href="https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/day-jobs" rel="nofollow">https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/day-jobs</a>
Tax collector? The tax was the (very unpopular) excise, and Burns wrote the poem "The Deil's Awa wi the Excise Man": <a href="https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/node/id/420" rel="nofollow">https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/node/id/420</a> .<p>I suppose that the modern equivalent would be holding down a job in academia and writing op-ed articles about how terrible it is for the country. But you can't sing an op-ed.
There’s a passage in <i>A Moveable Feast</i> where Hemingway recounts an attempt to solicit funds to get T. S. Eliot out of the bank so he could focus on his poetry. I don’t think that succeeded, but Eliot eventually moved to an editorial position at the publisher Faber and Faber.