Poetry as a Career: Advice

http://members.wizzards.net/~mlworden/atyp/advice.htm

I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place — in this culture — to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best.
— Maxine Kumin

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
— Donald Hall

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.
— James Dickey

On solemn asses fall plush sinecures,
So keep a straight face and sit tight on yours.
— X. J. Kennedy, To A Young Poet

A young poet must discover who he is, he must create himself as a poet. Even a genius must do this. It's a painful process, splitting out your own skin and squeezing your soul and body out of it, even, sometimes, before you know the shape of color of the new self you are going to become.
— Daniel Hoffman

A Poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
— Robert Frost

The finest cowboy poems rarely cut it on the printed page. They must be recited the way they are written, from the noggin, with feeling. They're like fine wine. They must breathe, especially if they've been bottled up too long.
— David J. Swift

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.
— Henry David Thoreau  

Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love.
— Richard Hugo 

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.
— Stanley Kunitz

“You should have your head filled with poems all the time, until they almost get in your way.”

--Elizabeth Bishop

The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.
— Robert Graves

The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself—which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.
— Robert Graves

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems—especially wonderful tough monosyllables like “gasp” and “cry.” Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.
— Donald Hall

Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
— Samuel Johnson

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly— and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
— Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world— unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn't.

It's the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

—    ee cummings