24 January 2010
A thought-provoking piece on the financial structure of the poetry market by Patrick Gillespie, a Vermont poet.
I don’t agree with everything that Gillespie says, but he certainly gives one a lot of food for thought. The string of comments at the end are well worth reading too.
What I think is wrong about his contention that poetry should be set loose into the commercial market of populism is that poetry has never been a popular medium; it’s always been the pleasure of and a pursuit by elites. Few poets have ever--and I mean ever--made a living from their poetry outside of patronage. Chaucer was a bureaucrat; Lydgate (probably the most-read English poet of the Middle Ages, but roundly criticized as awful ever since) was a monk; Wyatt received the patronage of Henry VIII’s court; Shakespeare was an actor and theatrical producer; Emily Dickinson had family money; William Carlos Williams was a physician; Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon are university professors; and so on. When we think of the “poet,” we conjure up a vision of Allen Ginsberg, who did indeed manage to forge a living from his poetry while avoiding patronage, but Ginsberg is the exception not the prototype.
About the only place where there is a large and sustainable popular market for poetry is in song lyrics. Rap, in particular, is an enormously inventive and exciting poetic genre. True, there are a lot of really bad song lyrics too, but that’s the case with any genre of literature. And of course, the commercial music industry is more concerned with what is marketable than what is good, so there is a certain selling of the soul for anyone who treads this path. But outside of music, the popular appeal of poetry is, and always has been, quite limited, as is the ability to make a living from poetry outside of acquiring a patron.
So what Gillespie seems to be really objecting to is that the modern patron (the university system) has bad and outdated tastes. But that has been the complaint of poets and writers about patrons since time immemorial. Not that the complaint isn’t valid, but it’s the nature of the beast.
(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish.)
