{"id":6908,"date":"2007-10-15T03:36:51","date_gmt":"2007-10-15T03:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mrsokana.wordpress.com\/2007\/10\/15\/great-way-not-to-make-a-living\/"},"modified":"2007-10-15T03:36:51","modified_gmt":"2007-10-15T03:36:51","slug":"great-way-not-to-make-a-living","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/2007\/10\/15\/great-way-not-to-make-a-living\/","title":{"rendered":"Great way not to make a living"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sean O’Brien, one of Britain’s most celebrated poets, said last night that he regarded his work more as an “affliction” than a career and would not recommend it to anyone, as he won the prestigious \u00a310,000 Forward Poetry Prize for the third time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ra, ra, ra to Mr O’B\u00a0for disclosing the realities of the moronic times we are living in and how impossible it has become for artists to make a basic living.\u00a0 The extraordinary thing is how any book ever is written if you consider that it’s so damn difficult a thing to do, even on a technical level, and that’s before you address the matter of your\u00a0stomach welding to your back like a set of bellows if you don’t feed it.<\/p>\n

It’s really a savage process. Being an artist is akin to being devout you need to maintain a certain degree of\u00a0delusion or suspended disbelief to keep going.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0Emerging voices are the ones most at risk; there’s so little mentorship and possibility\u00a0for them to\u00a0become better writers.\u00a0 Mr O’B has some advice:<\/p>\n

He also urged younger poets to resist the modern- day urge to publish before their work had matured. “I don’t think people necessarily need to rush into print. It might be a good idea to really learn the craft than think about publishing. Because of the way we live, people want instant results but poetry doesn’t perform in that way,” he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s not just poetry,\u00a0sometimes people will tell you a story doesn’t quite “work”, but they’ll rarely\u00a0tell you how you might\u00a0fix it.\u00a0The only route to acquire such knowledge these days would appear to be staring at the thing til some kind of divine intervention\u00a0intercedes with a\u00a0refusal to budge from it and the damn thing improves.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0My next question is has it always been this bad?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0Rest of the newspaper piece on Mr Poet\u00a0 here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sean O’Brien, one of Britain’s most celebrated poets, said last night that he regarded his work more as an “affliction” than a career and would not recommend it to anyone, as he won the prestigious \u00a310,000 Forward Poetry Prize for the third time. Ra, ra, ra to Mr O’B\u00a0for disclosing the realities of the moronic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6908\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anakanaschofield.com\/website_66900629\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}