Barry Schwabsky's song of himself

You know, you can’t necessarily decide what you should do and then execute that decision. Some people can, but not me. For me, it’s not a question of what I should write or even what I could write—but of what I can write. I recognize that my capacities and aptitudes are fairly limited. There are all kinds of things I like to read but are part of an endeavor that I know it’s not in me in contribute anything substantial to. To some extent these limitations are almost physiological: I’ve got a nervous disposition, I’m easily bored, so it doesn’t work for me to try and do anything in too systematic a way—it’s got to be something more mercurial. And then there are questions of what you might call self-image that reinforce this. There are a lot of people out there who are trying to be professional poets. I don’t think they really are that entirely—in most cases it would be more accurate to say that they are professional poetry teachers. But in any case, they need to have a certain track record, they need to publish a certain amount and so on. And I think it makes more sense for those people to do project-oriented works than it does for me, so I kind of steer clear of their territory. I believe in a division of labor! It’s all worth doing, but that doesn’t mean that I have to do all of it. I cultivate an idea of myself as an amateur, so I like pushing the idea that I will write poetry without a plan or schedule, that it will be something I dip into periodically—like a dilettante! Why not? (Anyway, it’s hard enough for me to do that with the writing I have to work at systematically, my art criticism.) I admit that this is really a sort of vanity, not very different from my notion that since I don’t work in an office, I will never dress in any clothes that anybody would ever be likely to wear to the office—that way no one will ever mistake me for an office worker. Likewise, no one should ever mistake my poetry for that of a creative writing professor. Ridiculous, I know, but there you go.