Poetry as privilege and end-of-the-year hijinx.

[nerdzrule23]

Comments

[frenchroast]

But to have someone suggest that I'm only doing what I'm doing because I'm rich and/or white...that's tough to swallow.I think the idea behind the idea that it's a rich/white field is that a higher percentage of people who go into it can afford to not get a job (or to wait around for a job), because they have parents who can bail them out until they succeed. Of course, many people in many fields have parental safety nets. But because the humanities, especially lit/poetry is such a brutal, masochistic field to find a job in, most people who have to succeed in order to survive tend to avoid it, and instead choose fields they know might not be as fulfilling, but are more lucrative. Basically, fewer people can afford to take a chance in humanities/lit unless they have a fallback. Those who do take the chance and don't have parents who will bail them out(you, me, all the people in the "I'm going to end up living in a cardboard box because I chose a major I loved" facebook group) are anything but rich as far as money is concerned

[frenchroast]

Jeez, "the idea behind the idea." I need to proof before commenting.

[secretpunch]

I think a better way of understanding this is to recognize what an incredible privilege it is to receive the sums we do for writing. The only reasonable response is gratitude.

[nerdzrule23]

...except that we don't receive the sums for writing. We receive them for teaching, at least here at Purdue.

While I am grateful for both the teaching experience and the financial compensation, we have to be realistic about the university as an institution. They pay grad students to teach introductory composition because it's much more cost-effective than appointing lecturers to do the task