It's a calling, not an enterprise. As far as the politics of my writing is concerned, I am quite simply an incendiary, which explains to an extent why, as a middle-age man, I am just beginning to reach an audience. I've never gone to a writer's conference, I've never applied for a grant, I've never had lunch with an editor. I've never had a mentor. No gravy trains or medallions.
Poets have to create their own footpads.
The corporate culture demands corporate writers, in the same way that the academic culture demanded academic writers after WWI, which produced the carbuncles of Pound, Williams, Joyce, Eliot, and the moronic types who looked good on course-lists. Today, almost all serious writing is inept and wan. Everybody is trembling snug in their niches. In poetry, it is free verse that is way too free, mixed metaphors that are way too mixed, and the fetor of utterance. Utterance is what swings from the belly of a cow.