so i started writing an end of the year wrap up post and then somehow here we are in january 2023 and that post never happened. instead, i decided to write a little bit about what motivates me as a poet.
no one becomes a poet to make money. although there are poets who publish and get grants, funding, residencies, speaker’s fees, etc and make money from that. inflation and high housing and food costs have made this type of life difficult. i know a lot of people of color who did not come from wealth or privilege and make this a sustainable life for themselves. i also recognize that in many cases, writing is not an easy life to maintain financially. i also know a good deal of poets who have spouses that can financially support them, or do come from money, or went to a fancy MFA program that has connected them to resources and publishing. there is no one experience to being a poet. some poets live in big markets like NYC, Chicago, or LA, and have full time jobs that pay the bills. others juggle several PT jobs. most of us struggle in this capitalist society built on violent economics.
my path hasn’t been so linear either. when i quit teaching in 2009, i had a well paying job in Barranquilla, Colombia, at a private university. i lived in a very nice apartment, and honestly could have stayed there several years, as many of my colleagues had. but my mental, physical, and emotional health were collapsing. so i quit my job, packed up my very few possessions, and came back to texas. i lived with a toxic partner, took up a job at the photo department at walgreens on south lamar in austin, and started writing poems on an old sony vaio laptop. then we broke up and i slept on a friend’s couch for a few months, until i took a job as a barista downtown. i took the bus to and from work, saving up until i could rent a room in a house on duval, down the street from quack’s bakery. i saved up until i could buy a bike, and until i could rent an apartment. but i never called myself a poet. i was barely surviving. when i look back on that time, i think that turgenev taught me how to love, and that was how nihilism allowed me to live, to survive, in an attempt to resist political and social hierarchies and class. i had detested authority since i was a kid. the experience of living and being a worker further radicalized my poetic motivations, as well as the sometimes agonizing consequences of choosing to be queer (and i do not mean in a biological sense. only that i choose to live openly and freely as a queer person no matter what that brings to my life).
i have been reflecting on the choices i have made that have led me here, today, the second week of january 2023, writing to you my audience, on a windy day with an alarming temperature of nearly 70 degrees. i woke up around 7 am, which is my usual time, took my dog out, played with him, made coffee and toast (my usual breakfast), and then spent my morning answering emails and applying to jobs that won’t completely eat my soul. i’ve been very privileged and blessed that time and work has healed part of my relationship with my blood family, and i am able to have a room in my father’s house (as he always reminds us). these past three years have been very good years in terms of writing (for me) because i have grown since the poems i wrote in grad school, and the ones i wrote in between 2006 and 2020. i hope to continue to grow, to protest, to enjoy the heat of a texas sun, the continual health of my snake plant, reading theories and ideas and poems that are comforting but also disturbing, challenging and onerous, augmentations of thoughts and arguments about everything, to write and to talk, and more than anything else - to love. and not in a nihilistic way.
what motivates me now - as a poet?
what do you think?