“This wasn’t really a 5, but poetry always gets a 5 from me. Because fuck it. This is my place. I make the call. That’s a TSwift line, so you know I’m fuckin’ serious on this one.
Robert Hershon is in his 80’s, and it looks like he does some editing and makes his way as a poet. Can you imagine? Is that even a thing anymore? You’d have to be fuckin’ nuts to embark on a career as a poet today. You can’t even really make it writing horror novels or journalism or any respectable thing, so imagine trying to cut a check as a poet.
There are some things that I think will be very difficult to explain to children born after 2010. A few:
+It’s going to sound nuts to say that you would drive to a state where you’d never even been before with a paper map printed 15 years prior. Once you got into town, you’d just, I don’t know, go to a place and shit.
+If you were a dude who had a taxidermied 2-headed calf, you could set that up somewhere, charge like $3 bucks to see it, and actually make money that way.
+Scantron tests. Those are gonna be hard to explain. Because frankly I’m not even sure how they worked.
+The entire concept of albums, like a band putting together an album with only a few good songs and a bunch of filler. That is going to make no sense.
+Making a good wage by writing poems. “