[Maryann Corbett]

Here's an article that's sure to set us grumbling.

It happens to appear at the same time as a Facebook discussion (involving, among others, Rattle editor Tim Green and poet Jenna Le) about the hopelessness of trying to make money at poetry.

[W.F. Lantry]

Um, is that **this** Michael Lind?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lind

Anyway, it's an old argument. Here's a poem from nearly a hundred years ago:

"For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start—

No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date; ..."

Pretty sure we could go back even farther, and find people saying "Ah, things used to be good, but no-one loves poetry anymore." Like, say, all the way back to Roman times. People always postulating some previous golden age are often saying more about themselves than about reality.

More interesting, I think, is this Salon piece from the other day:

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/25/spon...ey_comes_from/

Of course, it's limiting to talk about our spouses in terms of money. There are many, many other kinds of spousal supportiveness, and I'm certainly the poster child for one of them. My writing would be nowhere without Kate. I don't think our spouses can ever get enough credit for what we produce.

Best,

Bill

[John Whitworth]

It's nonsense. Poetry was never for the man in the street. I doubt if a Roman butcher got much out of Virgil and he wouldn't be able to make head nor tail of Horace. Martial's dirty bits maybe, but only the irty bits. And the man in the street likes a filthy limerick, which is certainly poetic art of a sort, if only to get it to scan..

Of course most of the audience at a poetry reading writes poetry. Most of the crowd at a cricket match, the men anyway, play or have played cricket. And when I was young every boy in scuffed jeans with long hair who wnt to a Bob Dylan concert was writing songs and playing a guitar. But most of the people do or did the thing badly. They love to see or hear it done well.

And lots of us hear do it well. Here's to us. As for money, the finest golfer who ever lived was Bobby Jones. Never made a penny out of it. The finest cricketer was Victor Trumper. Ditto.

[Susan McLean]

I think an art is still an art, whether or not anyone outside the field is paying any attention to it. In most creative endeavors there is a full range of participants, from the beginner who is just doing it as a hobby to the person who is devoting his or her life to perfecting work that experts in the field admire. Sometimes it takes a long time to sort out which is which, and contemporary recognition or monetary compensation are not the chief factors in whose work will survive.

Susan

[Wintaka]

If "Poetry was never for the man in the street" Shakespeare would have died a pauper.

As for not being able to make money by targeting ourselves, I can't argue when self-fulfilling prophecy meets simple economics.

In truth, no form of writing is more profitable than poetry, at least until and unless we accept some imaginary rule that verse cannot be set to music. Even if we exclude lyrics (why?), though, we are confronted by the fact that the two best selling authors of the 20th Century were both rhyming metrical poets.

Thanks for bringing this article to our attention, Maryann, although it lost me when the author concluded that editors who prefer Patrick O’Brien's work "don't even read the literary fiction that [they] publish or review." Is this an either/or thing? Those of us with guilty pleasures need to know!

Colin

[Ann Drysdale]

Do you think he misspelled Patrick O'Brian's name on purpose just to prove he didn't read him?

[John Whitworth]

'Tis caviare to the general'

[Wintaka]

Thou art sure of me--go, make money.

[Kyle Norwood]

What's in a name? Would a hobby by any other name sound as trivial? I think it's useless to deny that poetry has declined in status. Not even academics are really interested in it anymore--theory has the prestige that poetry used to have (definitive proof that most academics have lost their minds). Does it matter? Since I've fallen hopelessly in love with poetry, what good does it do to tell me that it's a dithering ne'er-do-well? All I can say is, "You don't know it like I know it."

As for writers and their sources of income: It's a big issue, both for the haves and the have-nots. I'm fairly confident that I'll manage to get a book published somewhere in the next few years, probably at age 63 or 64. I had to work for a living, never went to an MFA program, never landed an academic job. My book will be much better than it would have been 20 or 30 years ago, but there's no question that lack of income changed my career, and I don't think my situation is at all uncommon.

Wintaka, really? The best-selling writers of the twentieth century were lyric poets? I guess Agatha Christie wrote some poems, but I've never seen them, and I don't think they're what made her so popular. Or did you mean the best-selling poets? Frost and who, Millay? Eliot has probably done as well as Yeats, and Ginsberg probably outsold even Frost. (And of course Rod McKuen outsold them all by an enormous margin.) But if you know of any source of reliable figures, I'd be interested to know about it.

[John Whitworth]

Academics are the LAST people I would ask? Not YOU and YOU and YOU. But those other academics.