Poor Poetry Mothers

Sandra Simonds has an interesting essay on her website.

From the piece...

I have been thinking about mothers who are poets who live in poverty or close to the poverty line. Some of them are writing within academia, some of them not. Most of the mothers who I have been thinking of are adjuncts. They teach five or seven or sometimes more classes a semester. They do not have health insurance and I think about their struggles to write poetry. I want you to know that in many cities it costs 1,000 a month to put a child in daycare. I also want you to know that in many places, you only get a few thousand dollars to adjunct a class. There are so many mothers who get up at 5 am to write poetry and they are poor and they keep going on. They teach their classes and they come back home and they love their children and they are very tired and then they get online and they tutor for extra money. I want to tell you that no matter how much they work, they are still poor.

I want to tell you about these mothers because you might not know them or know anything about them or maybe you don’t want to think about them. It could be that you are a young man in your twenties and you spend a lot of time at the bars, drinking and hanging out with your friends and having sex with random girls or boys—and then you go home and you feel such inspiration to write your poetry about the moon and your half-cooked romances and how the streets look as you make your way home from these bars.

I want to tell you that there are mothers who get up at 5 am when you are walking home to write poetry and these mothers are very tired and these poets are your mothers also and their fatigue is real and not made up or imagined.