[New-Poetry] Business of poetry

[Bob Grumman]

David Graham wrote:
> Students fairly commonly inquire whether there are any poets in the U.S. who
> "make a living" with their poetry.
>
> I think a simple answer is tricky.  If by "make a living" one means
> royalties alone, I doubt there are many.  Maybe none?  I would venture to
> guess that even Billy Collins, Maya Angelou, Mary Oliver and such luminaries
> do not earn much of a white-collar wage from royalties alone.
I suspect Angelou makes a lot from her novels, which are in many public 
schools.

> Certainly
> they make much more from reading and lecture fees, in any case.
>
> I once heard Donald Hall remark that he had earned more editing a single
> textbook than for all of his books of poetry combined.
>
> And how would you count someone like Mark Strand?  Whatever his book sales,
> I'm sure he made most of his daily bread down the decades not in reading
> fees but in the classroom.  Yet he wouldn't have been in the classroom had
> he not had a high reputation as a poet, etc.
>
> The wonderful and underappreciated Robert Francis made a valiant go of it,
> trying to live purely as a poet.  He lived in poverty his whole adult life,
> accordingly.  But even he had to give music lessons and such to get by, not
> to mention growing his own food and, near the end of his life, accepting
> charity to get his house painted and so forth.
>
>   
I brought up "professional poets" more or less tongue-in-cheek.  The 
real professional poet of today in the US, it seems to me, is the 
academic who is paid for his poetry not in royalties but in advancement 
in teaching--just as many other academics are paid for what they write 
as historians, philosophers, etc., in advancement as professors.  To 
agree more or less with what I take David to be saying.

--Bob G.