Livelihood challenges reading. Like any important work of poetry, it poses immediately the question of “how to read.” That question ultimately resonates for poetics in general, that is, for our habits and customary formulations about reading and about what a poem is as it lays itself open to, or troubles, or even forecloses our reading practices. More than any other volume of Scully's to date, Livelihood announces itself forcefully as a book: in its heft, its substantiality in the hand, in its imposing material presence, this is a very different object than the slim sheaf of carefully arranged poems that the prevalence of lyric forms has led the reader to expect will be the format in which poetry arrives. The materiality of the book as object is not irrelevant: it embodies and announces the gravity of the project Things That Happen, a twenty-five-year-long process of writing aimed at what Scully has famously described as constructing or assembling books rather than composing poems. Livelihood, as a book constructed of five books, stands as the centerpiece of that project, transforming the previously published chapbooks or booklets that it assembles into parts of an imposing whole, making a “fat book” that communicates a certain monumentality.

Yet its monumentality and its gravity as an object in the world are counterpointed at once by its title, Livelihood. A livelihood is a means to life, but it is not a career, in the sense of a curriculum vitae that suggests a life that is a developing whole, an achieved and coherent vocation shaped by a singular plan or intention: say, “a ‘career in / “development”’, the ‘management of the poor’” (L 186). A livelihood does not lend itself to any idea of an opus, to a corpus of work bent on totality or monumentalizing a “life work.” It connotes, rather, a casual relation to gaining a living, an occasional relation to work and to the material necessity of some source of income in order that the work of writing might proceed. Livelihood reflects often enough and intimately on this conundrum of living and dwelling poetically: