"'Poet' must be used cautiously; it names an aspiration, not an occupation. In other words: not a noun for a passport." -- Louise Glück
Your statement is too short to read much into, but I'm amused at the negative response given its similarity to Glück's. For anyone who doesn't know, Glück is a former US Poet Laureate and won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature.
> I want to be very explicit that I didn't get 'cancelled'. Everyone made a series of decisions and those decisions have consequences. That's it. It is merely consequential.
I suppose it’s in the eye of the beholder, but that seems like a situation where they’d want to be careful not to hurt their industry relationships, or end up right-wing-coded by becoming “cancelled”.
> I wish poets understood that the general population has no interest in what we do, so when we speak we are speaking only to each other.
I think to some extent the second part is responsible for the first: Poetry took a hard turn with Modernism and has become increasingly academic and bound up with academia ever since*. It's barely meant for other people anymore, and when it is, academics are often dismissive or outright hostile. Strange that anyone could disagree with Dani Rose's comment, let alone attack her over it.
* I'm a lapsed academic and my field was Modernism. Love the stuff, but am under no illusions about the readership of, say, Ezra Pound.
At least in the Indian film industry, we have songs and lyricists. Popular music may call them songwriters. Many lyricists are published poets and identify their vocation as a poet/writer.
I'd have thought a profession was something you made a living from, not something you sometimes got some money for - I sometimes get paid to play music in bars, but music is not my profession. Neither Philip Larkin nor Seamus Heaney made a living from poetry, so I'd guess nobody else does either
Depends on how you think about the act of professing. Taking it literally it would be those that profess - articulate, exude, demonstrate, apply - their knowledge, skill and experience. Remuneration could be seen as irrelevant in this context.
