Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 24, Section Two. The Poet as Poor Person

  The Poet as Poor Person; Section Two. The Life of Gwendolyn McEwen.


    "A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence," wrote the 19th century poet and prodigy John Keats. "He has no identity, he is continually informing and filling some other body." This was Gwendolyn McEwen's  life up to her closing days. She rarely had money, lived in small or tiny apartments, took money from her friends and kept on drinking. Yet she also wrote some fine poetry.
     "It is not lost," wrote McEwen about a higher power in her poem 'The Shadow Maker' . "It is moving forward always shrewd and huge as thunder, equally dark.
      "It loves you when you are most alone."
      Despite the many prizes that poets now receive, the vast majority of Canadian writers and many other artists, rarely make much money from their work. "I have a full-time job," a jazz singer told me. "It pays my bills. My singing gigs don't." McEwen lived by her writing, Yet poetry couldn't sustain her money-wise or wipe out her terrible memories of her childhood.
     She remains a great Canadian poet who lived her whole life on very little money. Her life in some ways mirrored the lack of cash that many Canadian creative artists endure who depend on their talent to survive. Yet luckily most of them didn't go through the traumas that McEwen did as a child and as an adolescent.
    Money problems and a traumatic childhood speeded McEwen to a relatively early grave. Her life was i a Canadian tragedy.