The problem of selling poetry to poets by Helen Nelson is brilliant. The most accurate overall picture of “poetry market” or the “poetry business” I’ve seen. It starts…
Let’s say you’re running a cake shop.
It’s a really lovely shop: everything is baked on the premises. To begin with there are just rock cakes and scones, but they’re good.
Then one of your customers brings in a box with some home-made mille feuilles. Amazing cakes: light as a feather and filled with a whisked cream and custard mixture. You take these on as part of your regular stock – what could be nicer? – and soon there’s a lively demand. The mille feuilles are your best sellers.
Two more good customers arrive the following month with samples of their own home-baking. One has a brilliant carrot cake; another some banana bread from her grandmother’s secret recipe. You agree to sell those too.
It owns my funny bone. Stay tuned with it.
The rates have gone up and the profits have gone down. So you apply to the local Council for a Tarts Grant because you’ve heard the Danish Pastry man has just got one. The Council says they will give you some money, provided you can show what you’re doing is
a) filling a genuine need for more cake
b) nutritionally sound
c) innovative
d) reaching the population of the whole village.
Now the comparison has the lack of parallel in that it isn’t an extra communication but can be a very rich source of nutrients. But then it also is a hyper-stimulus, a supernormal stimulus like music or movies or refined sugar like many cultural artifacts that appeal but can’t be the sole diet.
Kathy Mac at Occupy Papers says that poetry doesn’t promise money or money’s security but provides connection to something larger than self. It’s a quick impulse in people who are in grief to turn to poetry as a means for expression. Poetry provides comfort to any wealth level in articulating for you unbearable emotional hurdles. Certainly (without doing a book by book count) the bulk of poetry books seem to come out of the tumult of parental death, breakup or childbirth. Maybe this isn’t high art but therapy that gets one on the road of learning to listen to self and others and articulate.
If its the poetry type that provides alternate ways of looking at things, articulating in complex grey areas (which I’d say most poetry by volume doesn’t), there’s a possibility [she says surely], poetry can leverage social change on the level of individual and society because, she says,
increasing linguistic literacy increases the capacity to perceive complex problems and formulate flexible solutions, skills crucial to understanding (a) the ultimately destructive compulsion to slather more wealth over our wealth, and (b) how to convert that systemic compulsion to a systemic compassion.
I like the idealism of that. It’s big shoes to fill. More worthwhile than trying to sell hot cakes in a heat wave.
It argues that poetry has power when brokering in emotions. I have an ongoing issue with that. Perhaps that is a stage with me. Any emotional door that opens is liable to cause a clown car of tangle in the door frame. A surge of grief to elbows past everything else. I’m not tired of emotional poetry so much as the stampede that I resent where every stimulus causes the same boring response of anger/grief.
Poetry that uses other parts of the brain and body is a welcome workout, working with strengths instead of exacerbating weaknesses.