From Dissections To Depositions, Poets' Second Jobs
"No man but a blockhead," Samuel Johnson famously observed, "ever wrote, except for money." This is tough news for poets, since the writing they do is often less immediately profitable than a second grader's math homework (the kid gets a cookie or a hug; the poet gets a rejection letter from The Kenyon Review). Poetry itself is tremendously valuable, of course, but that value is often realized many years after a poem's composition, and sometimes long after the end of its author's life.
In the meantime, everyone's got to eat. So unless you win the lottery, being a poet means finding a job that can support the writing of poems. Over the past few decades, that job has overwhelmingly involved teaching in university departments of English and/or creative writing. In the 2012 edition of The Best American Poetry, for instance, almost all of the 75 contributors have taught poetry in universities, or earned an advanced degree in poetry, or (more frequently) done both.
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