I loved Lowell’s poems about being a poet in the making, but as I raced from school to one job to the next and then home to my parents’ house, where I lived through all four years at a small Methodist college in Montgomery, I was acutely troubled that Lowell traded on the fame of his name, his teachers, his friends, to give the poems cachet. A few friends got very upset with the poems, and a part of me agreed with them while another part was enjoying the intensity of their unhappy reaction.
Long before, I’d vowed not to do it for that very reason, which added the thrill of a vow violated when I did do it. Writers aren’t supposed to write about writing or being writers because it’s more than a bit solipsistic. I liked the idea partly because it was perverse. After four or five years working on that book, my brain was still locked into the autobiographical mode, and I almost compulsively kept going into the time I was making myself into a poet. I began “Day Job and Night Job” after finishing The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood.
When was this poem composed? How did it start? So my hand could move as theirs had moved Hudgins is currently Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at The Ohio State University. His new book, Shut Up, You're Fine!: Poems for Very, Very Bad Children, will be published by The Overlook Press in March 2009, with illustrations by Barry Moser. Andrew Hudgins has published six books of poetry: Ecstatic in the Poison (2003), Babylon in a Jar (1998), The Glass Hammer (1995), The Never-Ending (1991), After the Lost War (1988), and Saints and Strangers (1985).
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