The internet, or more precisely that very tiny portion of the internet devoted to poetry, has lately been abuzz about the value of poetry and of poetry magazines. Jessica Piazza, on her blog Poetry Has Value, discuses her year-long experiment in sending her poetry only to markets that pay. (Her total as of May: $226.50, not bad at all for poetry.)
My view is that poetry has value, but not economic value. (And I don't think Piazza would necessarily disagree, despite her understandable wish to profit by her labor.) Lovers find their beloved valuable. That's the kind of value poetry has.
Let me compare poetry to another activity I was briefly obsessed with: tournament scrabble. (I've given up scrabble because I only have time for one profitless obsession.) Like poetry, tournament scrabble is a tiny niche--even tinier than poetry, with a few thousand devotees, but more tightly organized into a community. Like poetry, tournament scrabble has a few big prizes ($25,000 to the National Scrabble Champion, the last time I checked), dozens of tiny prizes for less important tournaments, and no monetary prospects for most players. Like poetry, tournament scrabble is of interest only to the participants. Occasionally the outside world enjoys laughing at the peculiar freaks who take tournament scrabble seriously--most notably after sportswriter Stefan Fatsis wrote an amusing book about the subculture called (naturally) Word Freak.
Nobody complains about not getting paid to play scrabble. Nobody complains about paying substantial fees to play in tournaments. Yes, they get the pleasure of playing the game, and obviously there's not much pleasure for a poet in receiving form rejection slips, even if they're balanced by occasional acceptances. But the biggest difference between scrabblers and poets is that scrabblers know their activity has no economic value. Poets aren't sure, and wish things were different, and wonder if things will change, and get nostalgic about the good old days of Byron, Tennyson and the Brownings, when a handful of poets made the kind of money that 100 million businessmen in the English-speaking world make today.
Piazza has suggested that if poets would all buy more magazines and periodicals, poetry could support itself. ("Poetry Has Value, But Do We Value It?") Well, it certainly wouldn't hurt if poets bought more poetry. But I wonder . . . How many poetry collections were published in the last decade? Tens of thousands, I'm guessing? I try to be aware of "what's going on" in poetry, but I'm astonished at the number of published poets I've never heard of. And while I think Theodore Sturgeon's rule applies here--"ninety percent of anything is crap"--there's an astonishing amount of fairly competent poetry appearing every year, poetry that would, in a poetry-loving world, get a fair look. And for every volume of poetry published, isn't there at least one issue of a literary magazine that publishes poetry? With so much product, and close to a one-to-one ratio between consumers and producers of poetry, how many books and magazines would every poet have to buy to keep the system afloat? Hundreds a year? More than one could ever read? Piazza feels guilty that she doesn't find time to buy and read more poetry, while admitting that her five part-time jobs don't leave her much time. I feel guilty too, I suppose, but I have to wonder: if I read poetry every waking minute, could it possibly be enough to do my share of keeping the poetry world afloat?
A couple of decades ago, a mid-level worker at MacMillan tried to put the Collected Poems of Yeats out of print because it was selling less than 500 copies a year. His error was corrected by his bosses, but contemporary poets need not expect any such sentimentality. Shortly after the death of the fairly-popular poet William Stafford, his son Kim approached Stafford's publisher, Harcourt Brace, with a proposal for a collected volume. Harcourt informed Kim that, now that Stafford was dead, Harcourt had no interest in keeping any of his works in print, aside from a tiny selection made by Robert Bly. (Eventually Graywolf Press did publish a larger Selected Poems of Stafford. I wonder how many copies it sells per year. 50? Perhaps fewer?)
Poetry has no economic value, or so little as to make no difference. The only way to make money from poetry is tangential--by taking a job in one of the large-scale capitalist enterprises called universities. If you do, your job will be to help the university make money by convincing aspiring writers to pay many thousands of dollars in tuition to your university: that, and that alone, is the economic value of poetry.
There is no reason to think that poetry will suddenly become popular in the United States. Even the simplest written poetry requires a level of literary education that is rare in our semi-literate society.
Perhaps it's different in Europe, where cultural standards remain higher (for now). France, for example, still requires students to study several volumes of difficult contemporary poetry (Paul Eluard, Phillippe Jaccottet, Yves Bonnefoy) for their French Language baccalaureat exam. In the United States, if we were to show an equivalent interest in our culture, students would probably be tested on their knowledge of American Idol.
Having realized that literature sells no widgets, our government has progressively eliminated literary study from our national education standards. A century ago, Ezra Pound called the United States "a half-savage country, out of date." In 2015, it seems hard to question that America is the world's vanguard, up to date if anyone is. "Half-savage," however, still applies.
Poetry is valuable to me. It may be valuable to you. It has no value except through the love we give to it. There is simply no reason to bother with poetry unless you're hopelessly in love with it--so in love that all the social and economic logic in the world can't keep you away from it.
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