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Note on The Hobbyists

Poetry isn’t a job or a vocation.  If it doesn’t earn one enough to live on it’s no job.  If a poet is not appointed by his or her nature to sacrifice all for the craft, it’s not a calling either.  True, a few seem to be called; and a few earn money from poetry, if we include activities like public readings, reviewing, contributing to workshops.  I’d like not to include other full-time work, even teaching and writing novels: these steal too much time. But good and even great poets do have non-poetry jobs.  However, for my own part, earning a living has made me feel that poetry is a hobby, not employment:

The experts make the game, ignoring which

the aerial boys then better the idea

by instinct.  Rule within rule.  They make a niche...

That amateurs take the rules of a game from professionals hardly needs stating, but how do they ‘better the idea / by instinct’?  Well, this has to be ironic, since for instance an amateur astronomer betters the ‘idea’, but not the performance, of the professional by inventing his own inner game within the big outer game.  He creates a niche for himself in which he can fantasise at being noteworthy.  More generally, experts of all kinds keep the world, the larger game, going.  Hobbyists invent their own games within that world.

I drove to St Albans one day, walked around the park, saw these men with their model boats.  Argonaut: one who sailed in search of the Golden Fleece.  Diode: from di- (two) and -ode (path), an electrical device which is able to convert alternating current to direct current.  Ogive: a diagonal rib in a Gothic vault.  Hypocaust: ancient Roman heating system under floors or between double walls.  Lex: a body of laws.  Missal: a Roman Catholic prayer book.

Alan Marshfield

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