There’s a beautiful story about Emily Dickinson — and forgive me, as I’m telling this from memory (nearly every page of

My favorite Emily Dickinson poster -- Penelope Dullagan got her hair color down!

my copy of Richard B. Sewell’s The Life of Emily Dickinson is dog-earred, and, testimony to my love of Dickinson that may be, it’s not good for locating stories — though I think this one also appears in Adrienne Rich’s “Vesuvius at Home,” now that I think of it –).  When her niece visited, Dickinson took her upstairs and pretended to lock her bedroom door, saying something to the effect of “Martha (or Matty — perhaps Matty), this is freedom.”  And so in one simple phrase the cultural mythos surrounding Dickinson dissolves: it was Dickinson’s choice to stay in the attic, and it was a choice that she had to make for her own freedom.  Had she not, and had she taken on her expected role as a woman in the Dickinson household, she wouldn’t have time to write — by locking herself away, she gave herself the gift of freedom.

It’s a refrain that’s been sung time and time again, from Dickinson to Virginia Woolf (whose A Room of One’s Own has been sadly languishing on my bedside table, abandoned for Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, which was so terrifying I had to speed-read to the finish): in order to create art, one must have money and time.  Money and time.  Though there are, admittedly, many downsides to the academization of poetry, there is also one significant upside: the poet’s place in the academy ensures them time — or, rather, the promise of time.  Though the swirling Dyson-vacuum-esque chaos of the semester may send the poet scrambling for time to scribble down even just a line or two, there is always winter break, and summer break, and the promise of sabbatical, if one is lucky enough to make one’s way up the academic ladder.  Sometimes the promise of time is enough.  But the other thing — money.  How to solve that?

The usual argument reads as such, nearly a neat little syllogism: art is an activity of leisure.  One must have money to have leisure.  Therefore, one must have money to make art.  When I hear this argument, I can’t help but make the same response: Okay.  That might be true.  But, why? It seems that in our culture, the act of making art and the state of being moneyed are inextricably linked.  A simple glance through the AWP Chronicle or Poets and Writers or, really, any writing-related magazine or Website shows this to be true.  There are workshops which will help you to strengthen your work, often in exotic locations, near beaches and tiki bars: but there’s a very high cost for admission.  There are conferences where you can hear about aesthetics, meet others who’ve taken the same route in life as you, make necessary connections for furthering your career and your craft: but there’s a prohibitive cost for admission.  And on it goes — even the colleges known for their creative writing programs, from Bennington to Middlebury to Sarah Lawrence, have prohibitive tuition.  Even the thing artists most need to climb that academic ladder and achieve that grand promise of time — a book published with an academically-accepted press — is prohibitively expensive: many poets spend upwards of $250 a month in admissions fees.  To make art, this all seems to say, one must make money — or have money — and a great deal of it.  Okay.  That might be true.  But why?

It seems, to say the very least, unfair.  It seems like an incredibly unfair assumption that only the moneyed can make good art — and that good art must be done in leisure.  And it seems, most of all, that this is an incredibly dangerous assumption, treating art as something extra and unnecessary, an extravagance, like foie gras or Beluga caviar or some delicate and decadent desert.  If art is an extravagance, then it can be eliminated, and without a repurcussion — again, an incredibly dangerous idea.

The thing is that this worldview doesn’t include or accept the idea that art can — or should — be an integral part of life, that art should be accessible to the masses, not just the moneyed few.  The mere history of poetry supports this idea.  Yes, there were patrons and payers, and people who paid for poems, and paid artists to work for them.  Yes.  But these were not the only people who made poetry.  Some of the most beautiful and complicated forms of poetry originated as work songs.  The villanelle originated with farmhands — the word itself meant something like “country song” for a very long time.  Most cultures developed work songs for different types of work, from weaving to harvesting to bee-tending.  The mere fact of this proves that art shouldn’t be limited to the rich — and that art has a use, an importance, and a very great one at that, outside of the upper classes.

The question — and one I’ve been thinking a great deal about as of late — is how to break our assumptions and our cultural mode, how to bring art back into the world, where it belongs.  The steps I’ve thought up so far are small.  Very small.  But I have hope in small steps, and hope that others will take similar steps.  Dickinson herself, of course, said it best:

A Man may make a Remark—
In itself—a quiet thing
That may furnish the Fuse unto a Spark
In dormant nature—lain—

Let us deport—with skill—
Let us discourse—with care—
Powder exists in Charcoal—
Before it exists in Fire.