Poetry-Community Member with a PhD in English?
I got the degree in 1991, about thirty-five years (almost half my life) ago.
The same diffidence that keeps me from submitting poems for publication impeded my search for a professor gig.
I was offered a job at Lamar University, but I didn't take it because I didn't want to move my family to Beaumont Texas.
My devotion to literature came from a calling to write poetry, not to teach literature.
Corporate technical writing suited me better than teaching because it was collaborative.
I didn't have to represent myself as a big-prick authority.
In the poetry communities, my PhD is anomaly that, like my old-white-male talkativeness, predisposes people to dislike me.
Well, I AM kind of a snob, at that!
As a teenager, especially after my self-commitment to poetry as a life-calling, I read a lot of poetry - Keats, Yeats, Eliot, Williams, Ginsberg.
In graduate school I studied Milton, Tennyson, Frost, and Stevens.
My dissertation was on self-protective irony in Robert Frost.
Nowadays, in my seventies, I read quite a bit of poetry on social media, but I seldom read poetry books, and I don't follow poetry magazines.
The Villein-ous Dr. Yokel
Why would anyone be interested in an old white guy with
a PhD?
Are people supposed to be impressed?
But if you have some kind of a degree,
isn’t it dishonest not
to mention it on your resume? Even in my
buttoned-down days
as a technical writer, I knew people thought my PhD
just meant I was
an arrogant prick. It was tough to confess
to the degree,
actually. I had a job on a loading dock
quite a few years before I had amassed
the credits for my PhD,
but I had to leave
when a workmate sussed
out I had a college degree.
Not at all surprising that people are skeptical.
Beauty is as beauty does
if you’re an old white guy with or without a PhD
degree.
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