As promised, thing two of the two things left on the Pill's mind a couple of posts ago. I mentioned there and I've mentioned before the shrinking poetry dollar, or the shriveling part of the discretionary spending pie chart served up for poetry by the reading public. Where one used to complain that only poets were reading poetry, the days when that was the complaint now seem to have been the good old days. Even poets, or poetasters, or would-be, ersatz, erstwhile, proleptic and otherwise possible poets aren't reading the stuff these days.
I overstate, for polemical effect. But here's the thing: a whole lot of poetry books, chapbooks, mags, e-mags, zines, pamphlets, and broadsheets are being produced and marketed by presses large and small, corporate and academic, by indie and mini and micro and happy and sneezy and sleepy and doc. How much, this book-buying, mag-subscribing, screen-reading blogger wonders, is being sold (and, ipso fatso, bought)? Not enough of it, according to the frequent plaints and laments about the shrinking audience for poetry on the page (not the same as the audience for poetry in performance, which will require another post entirely). Which prompts the larger question: why are we bothering to sell the stuff anyway?
There was a time (1720 til 1890, say), and bliss was it in that dawn to be a poet (unless you were John Keats getting beaten up on the pages of the Edinburgh Review), when composer
s of verses could make an honest living by the sweat of their quills. Though, really, Grub Streeters still either required a wealthy patron or grunted and sweated under a weary weight of hack-work to keep themselves in cheap meat pies and sack. There followed that Golden Age when a strong dollar and inexpensive Euro-digs let some modernists live off their writing, but even then it was the rare poet who could get by without a wealthy spouse, the kindness of friends, a day job, or all of the above. It was, of course, the postwar proliferation of English departments (to soak up G.I. Bill undergraduates) and creative writing programs that provided the sinecures in which poets could secure the means of literary production.The point of this potted history, and especially of its parentheses, asides, digressions, and qualifications, is that the stuff has never sold well enough to keep more than a small handful of poets in garrets, tallow candles, and patched hose, and the poets who lived most securely while producing some great stuff tended to have (non-literary, non-teaching) day jobs anyway. So if most poets aren't making their living by selling their poetry and are instead making their living by writing other stuff or teaching or selling insurance, if, that is, most poets are producing poems not because it is remunerative but because it is in other (very important) ways fulfilling, and if, as I think is the case, one of the most important of those modes of fulfilling is precisely antithetical to the notions of capitalist production and the forces of the market (poetry as play, as the park rather than the factory), then again I must ask: why bother trying to sell it?
About thirty years ago, the poet Roy Fisher said in an interview that if poets wanted people to read their stuff they should just give it away. And poetry as part of a gift economy makes much more sense than the efforts to make it compete in the marketplace. Giving it away has a long and glorious history (think of all those poets in Tottel's Miscellany and the Egerton Manuscript). OK, those were courtiers (but think of the day jobs Wyatt and Surrey and company held while they wrote all those sonnets and epistles, while they blamed not their lutes and reached out to "Mine Own John Poins"! Would we have to re-think tenure requirements for poets with academic appointments? Sure: poets could list the pamphlets and loose sheets they handed out, the lyrics and eclogues and epics they posted to the blogosphere and their colleagues would have to do what they've let the market do for them all these years and evaluate the stuff themselves.
Dear Mr. Pill,
ReplyDeleteBliss ‘tis now. So much available for those of us who care. Looked at from a macro-economic perspective, the over-production of poetry publications suggests a fantastically healthy economy. America is so productive that we can blow resources on chapbooks nobody reads. When there is no longer an excess of resources available to do so, we are more likely to cherish what little new verse does get published, but we will be doing it in more impoverished circumstances. We’ll savor a good line together as we rub our glovless hands before the fire. We’re so well off, we can lavish tenure-line jobs on writers of forgettable talent who would, in another era, have been instead among your more intelligent farm hands. When we can no longer do so, my vegetable garden will be no longer a hobby, but a lifeline. Superfluity is a sign of health. Give it away? Sure! What fool expects to make money on poetry, anyway? But in the meantime, as the full pitcher of American wealth gets passed around, I’ll enjoy the sip that sloshes by thoughtless accident into poetry’s own half-pint.