Frugal Poets' Guide to Life: How to Live a Poetic Life, Even If You Aren't a Poet

Author

Frugal introduction

Poetry is my life, or at least a major part of it. I wasn’t born a poet. I became one. How does one become a poet? I think the better question is how does one live like a poet. That is, how can you lead a life that’s simple but full, elegant, creative and wealthy in all things, perhaps except overt materialism.

But let me say first that Frugal Poets’ Guide to Life is not necessarily about how to be a poet, though there is plenty within these pages on how to. You will not find an MFA approach to poetry here. In many ways this book is an anti-MFA guide to being a poet – or any other type of creative person. Poet Robert Frost said, To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

This book is part personal journey, part blog post excerpts from my blog with the same name as this book Frugal Poet’s Guide to Life (the poet in the blog is singular, the poets in this book is plural as it is both about you and me), which I’ve maintained online for a number of years. As well, this book is also part history and part reference guide.

The back portion of this book does focus on strictly poetry stuff, such as a brief history of the modern Chicago poetry scene, including the birth of the poetry slam, and how to give a poetry performance, as well as poetry-related resources around the country. Meanwhile, the book’s front end brings to fore the frugal poet as a state of mind, a creative way of looking at the world and regarding life through the poet’s eyes. Throughout are included practical, inexpensive tips for living a creatively elegant life based on modest resources.

Frugal Poets’ Guide to Life is not about how to live a poor life. A true frugal poet is a creative person of any persuasion, such as yourself (it shows – because you are reading this book). A creative person is more capable of living a rich life than someone who has a stash of cash, but is otherwise saddled with miniscule imagination, lackadaisical whatever motivation, and an if only attitude. So many, rich and poor alike, can be kept destitute with a dismissal of skills or keeping an arm’s distance from nature.

You may or may not be a poet in the writerly sense. I’ve created this book to root for and urge on anyone who follows a creative path and has a poet’s spirit, whether strictly a poet or not. I’m out to show how you can be creative, cool, smart, savvy, and in demand, living a full life without spending a lot of money. As the poet Robert Graves said, There is no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.

After I graduated from college, I may have been considered a brainy type (dean’s lists, honors societies), but pretty clueless about how to live -- which means, how to relish life in the here and now instead of waiting for tomorrow. Money? What was that? Most of all, I wasn’t at all sure what to do with my life.

I am thoroughly convinced that instead of letting life happen to us, we must instead create our lives. It takes action. Frugal does not mean without fortitude. Life means going through some doors. I’ve come and gone through a large number of them.

Sometimes the doors may seem oddly shaped with weird backward-facing door handles and bizarre hinges. Some of the doors we think we can barge through may be locked. Others that swing open freely and have a plaque hammered above them with our names on them may at first seem like doorways suited totally for other people, until we may discover to our surprise quite the contrary.

Who is the frugal poet writing this book?

I’d like to start out Frugal Poets’ Guide to Life in reference to some doors I went through personally. And also some doors I couldn’t go through. I hope to show how these experiences helped me create the life I live and have continued to live. One door may have seemed to lead me to what I thought was a blank wall, but in fact lead to another door that directed me toward writing and poetry.

I am not an academic poet. I don’t have a MFA, a PhD or even a bachelor’s degree in English or creative writing. I was an art history major in college. I didn’t attend a prestigious or Ivy League school. In fact, my alma mater is a state university located near downtown Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, otherwise known as UIC. It was more recently in the news as the site of the first Donald Trump rally protest at its UIC Pavilion in March 2016.

Despite UIC’s academic reputation as lesser sister to University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign downstate, the school had a notable, if not exceptional, art history department. I imagined that after graduation, I’d move ahead in a career as a museum curator or work for a downtown Chicago art gallery. Perhaps a gallery would send me to Europe in search of fabulous paintings and sculptures.

Writing poetry at that point was only my hobby. It was a way for me to work through broken relationships, unrealized dreams, urban issues, or occasionally having too many relationships at once (an oxymoron?). I certainly had a history of writing in my genes. My father Gilbert served a reporter, photographer and editor for the Chicago Daily News for decades before his death when I was age two. My great-grandfather, after he had immigrated to America from Ireland, had run his own newspaper in western Illinois. Unfortunately, I became close to these precious people only through stories.

I, like my ancestors, love the interrelatedness of words and visuals; how a picture can paint a thousand words, and how a thousand words, or fewer, can bring forth a dramatic picture. Even a well-crafted haiku or short poem has the uncanny ability to reveal powerful visuals in the mind’s eye, sometimes even more powerful than any photo or painting due to the duality of metaphor or juxtaposition.

As I eased toward the end of my senior year in college, I certainly looked forward to all those art-related job opportunities that I imagined were out there. During my final semester, I was offered a practical class in art history careers that took place off-campus from UIC at the Art Institute of Chicago. There, our class met with various conservators and curators. I used the museum library to research my senior thesis paper. The curators, all who had PhDs in art history, admitted that a curatorship was a low-paid position. Besides organizing shows and lecturing, a big part of the job was hobnobbing with the wealthy at parties and benefits to raise money for the museum. Hmmm, something I had a hard time imagining myself doing.

Later, our art history professor, David, told us that most of the curators were already from moneyed backgrounds, with trust funds and the like, and knew lots of people in high places before they got their jobs at the museum. This made them good fundraisers with access to society people. These curators really didn’t need the money, according to him. Being museum curators were glamor jobs, but jobs for those who already had glamorously deep pockets.

Was David, who had also been my art history professor in other classes since my sophomore year, finally being straight with our graduating class? Were our chances slim in what suddenly seemed the dead-end field of art history? Being from a working class neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago, I certainly didn’t have a trust fund or Saddle & Cycle Club socialite connections. Neither could I imagine spending four more years to become a PhD or learn additional foreign languages that art historians are expected to be familiar with.

I must admit that I had loads of fun writing my senior thesis on the topic of 4th century B.C. Greek earrings! As well, I knew deep down that this paper, though quite hefty and brilliant, was about as useful to my future career as actually changing my own earrings from the silver-tone posts I usually wore on Mondays to the copper hoops from the bottom of my dust-cornered jewelry box on Tuesdays.

Those end-of-university experiences were a rude awakening. However, I only let the discouragement skip two beats after graduation before I turned my focus instead on getting a job at one of Chicago’s Michigan Avenue fancy art galleries. I hit the streets in earnest, dressed up in my best suits and dresses, knocking on gallery doors one by one.

Unfortunately, the end of my college years coincided with one of the nation’s financial recessions. Not only were fewer collectors buying art, but it turned out that most galleries were family run anyway. That meant that any buying, traveling, show curating or other such fancy tasks was executed by daughters, sons, wives or brothers of the gallery owner. The only openings, when available, panned out as receptionists or part-time custodians.

I refused to be immediately dissuaded. After further tromping around, I got wind from one of the art gallery owners that Marshall Field’s department store was hiring management/buyer trainees. They were hiring candidates right out of college to work in the store’s home accessories division. This included Marshall Field’s in-house art gallery.

I went up to the grand store’s third floor to inspect the gallery. I had never heard about it before. As I entered, I found was a spacious, quiet, well-lit room with brilliant beams of light targeting large paintings. I caught the eye of the gallery manager who was standing next to one of the paintings. In hushed tones I asked about the canvases. All I saw at first, to my dismay were paintings of garish flowers and over-sentimentalized landscapes.

I didn’t tell the manager I was looking for a job. He explained that the large, obvious paintings were what sold, what people who were looking to match their décor ending up placed over their fireplaces or on master bedroom walls. He led me over to a corner with smaller works. Here was where the gallery displayed original Mucha posters, along with lithographs by Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. Seeing that, I so wanted to work there.

After applying, I went through a series of interviews with a tall, thin, proper blond bureaucrat lady and a kind-of-sexy, kind-of-corporate mustachioed man in his late 20s in Field’s human resources department. This man, it turns out, gave one of my future coworkers severe beard burn during an after-work make-out session.

During one of my interviews, both bureaucrat lady and sexy/corporate guy told me the art gallery didn’t need any new employees at the moment, but that the hardcover book department did. Since when were books considered home accessories? I suppose some people felt that books were a way to decorate book shelves the way the gallery’s paintings filled up space on the empty walls of customers.

Disappointed that I didn’t end up in the art gallery, but in need of a job, I accepted the book department position. I felt I could just switch over to that other home accessories department, i.e. the art gallery, when someone else left. Being on the same floor, I could keep an eye on and an ear close to what was going on in the gallery.

Nevertheless, I was excited to start my management/buyer position. It was the first step in my post-college career, right? Would I be going through a special training program? I was ambitious and ready. Would I be in on all the important meetings that the executives held, and be taken under their wings?

On the first day of work, I instead found myself at the low rung of the department – wearing a blue smock, pushing around a cart of heavy books to restock tables and shelves, flitting displays with a feather duster, and taking inventory on ladders in the back room.

Performing a hazing technique on me as the new hire, my coworkers made me collect the department’s dusty rags, which were used to wipe off books and counters, then tote them down the elevator to the third basement laundry room. Every new person was put through the same thing, I was told. Such knowledge was a small comfort as I descended to the depths of third basement with my dusty payload. Here, I found a windowless, fluorescent-lit maze of locked cages where a previous coworker had dropped dead next to his book cart, a victim of a heart attack.

Would I make it out alive? Somehow I arose back to the book department and sunlight, albeit with a glum look on my face. C’mon cheer up, we’ve all been rag lady or rag man when any of us first started, too, said salesperson Peggy. The ring of that name rag lady was anything but pleasing, but Peggy was trying to be helpful and humorous. I later found she was walking encyclopedia of authors, titles and book knowledge that was invaluable to me in doing my job.

On the selling floor, I was assigned to oversee certain salespeople, including Peggy, and to inventory, stock and reorder hardcover books in the categories that comprised belle lettres (I had no idea what that meant), as well as poetry, spirituality, religion and cookbooks. At Marshall Field’s, belle lettres meant books of classical versus modern literature (those were in the fiction section of the department), essays, literary criticism, with volumes such as The Diary of Samuel Pepys, The Complete Works of Shakespeare and Modern Library classics. Aside from poetry, and thank goodness for modern poetry, I had little interest in the other topics. Somewhat disgruntled, and a little overwhelmed by my lack of experience in the book world, I went about my work.

I hadn’t the faintest realization during those early months in my new job that I was surrounded by the very topics that would ultimately mean the world to me. How could I have known that, unwittingly, I had stepped into an environment of coworkers who were not moneyed or considered successes by any stretch of the imagination, but were intelligent, funny and readers of great depth and opinion. How could I have guessed that someday I myself would accumulate as many books as might supply a small town bookstore or library.

I now imagine that my Creator who had led me there knew better about where I should end up, and it wasn’t going to be in an art gallery. It was here, in Marshall Field’s book department, where I was exposed to those poets who had an early influence on my slowly growing body of written work, such as Galway Kinnell, Ira Sadoff, Ai, Heather McHugh, Nikki Giovanni, James Wright and others.

And it was at open mic venues I attended after work and at theaters and local universities were I decided that poetry was no longer a mere hobby, but a deeper avocation, even a calling. While audience members may not have been able to follow the full drift of my four-page-long poems at that time, certain spectators would come up to me after readings and say something such as I liked that line about 1,000 broken perfume bottles. What an image! or When you said in the poem ‘pretend it’s all a movie’ it reminded me that sometimes I feel like I’m in one, too.

It was in between dusting shelves and adjusting stacks of hardcover cookbooks that I read a Chinese poet who had written for decades but claimed not to have even scratched the surface of poetry’s secrets until he reached his 80s. Such knowledge was actually comforting in the midst of my slow, long apprenticeship of poetry. It might just take a lifetime commitment to accomplish this poetry thing. Was I ready for that?

From the poem The Great Flood of ’92

(Swimmer’s Prayer, Missing Spoke Press)

"in the third basement past

locked cages of Dostoyevsky,

full-story washing machines

churned suds all night long.

it’s where book department’s cobwebby rags

greeted dust rags soaked in spilled perfume

and pricey lotions from first floor cosmetics,

met oily rags that mopped janitors’ brows,

and those that wiped escalator bannisters

all the way downstairs."

How poetry launched my day job

The recession was still raging after two years of my pushing around a book cart, wearing a smock. There were no openings in the store’s art gallery as I had hoped. My thoughts of becoming a gallery or museum curator were quickly evaporating.

One of the exciting aspects of working in the book department were its regular public book signings, hosting such luminaries as novelist Gore Vidal, hairstylist Vidal Sassoon, conductor Sir Georg Solti, thinker and inventor Buckminster Bucky Fuller, baseball great Yogi Berra, former NYC Mayor John Lindsay, actor Bob Hope, chef Julia Child and many others. All arrived because they had just written a new book, be it fiction, a cookbook, autobiography or philosophy, giving my then callow self a chance to meet and interact with these successful writers from varied professions.

In addition to customers, certain employees from different departments would often gather around to purchase books and get them signed by the visiting authors. Among the regulars was Mary Ann, the copy chief from Marshall Field’s advertising department, who I also greeted and chatted up a couple of times while she waited in line to get her books signed.

Marshall Field’s has an advertising department? I later asked one of my coworkers. Where do you think all the newspaper ads come from? one answered. You mean all the ads in the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times come out of here? I said. Yeah, they don’t use an agency, the advertising department is in-house, she answered. A light went on for me.

Before long, I found myself taking the escalators up to the advertising department on the 9th floor, holding a small sheaf of my poems. I asked the advertising department receptionist if I could see Mary Ann. When she came up to small waiting area, I stood and explained how I was interested in working in the advertising department as a copywriter if they had an opening.

We don’t have any openings now, Mary Ann said. In fact, we just hired a new person. I suppose I looked a little downcast, but mostly embarrassed. Was I out of my league here? Do you have an advertising degree? she asked.

I don’t, I said. I have a degree, but it’s in art history.

Don’t you have a degree in English? she asked.

That smarted. What did I think I was doing up here! I don’t have an English degree, but I’m a writer, I said.

You’re a writer, she asked, dubiously. Do you have a portfolio?

I have written these poems, I said. Maybe you can read them.

Poems?! she said, looking incredulous, but trying not to be rude at the same time. She let me hand them off to her as I extended the sheaf sheepishly her way.

I appreciate you coming up here, and I know you’ve been working in the store for awhile, but I’m not sure poetry quite matches up with what we’re trying to accomplish with our advertising copy, she said.

I thanked her for her time, took the escalators back down to the book department and felt totally humiliated from making a fool of myself. I later avoided sitting anywhere near her if I saw her in the employee lunchroom, as I was embarrassed by any of my earlier suppositions that I’d be the least qualified to work in advertising. If I saw her getting onto an escalator, I waited until she was far enough away for me to get on, too, without her seeing me. And when she visited the book department on occasion, I gently tried to sashay the other way or find a reason to duck into the stock room.

One day, someone told me I had a call waiting on our interdepartmental phone. I walked over and picked up the receiver. It was Mary Ann. Cynthia, can you come up to the advertising department sometime today, she said. I’d like to talk with you.

Sure, I said. I have a break in another half hour. I’ll stop up. I hung up and tried to catch my breath. What did she want to tell me? I didn’t know what to expect.

When I arrived up by the advertising reception desk, May Ann again came out to greet me. We have an opening in the copy department, she said. Someone just left. She took a new job at an advertising agency.

"She did?" I said, not knowing what else to say.

I read your poems, she said.

"You did?" I said, not ever feeling she would even glance at them after I had handed the sheaf off to her several weeks before.

They’re actually quite good, she said.

"They are?" I said.

I think you have potential, she said. And because you already know the store so well after working here a couple of years, I’d like to give you a chance if you’re still interested.

A chance? Yes. As a copywriter? Yes. Yes, I was still interested! I started a couple of weeks later, sitting at a desk and typewriter in a room among 10 other copywriters, an all-women staff from