"But you can't make money writing poetry. And I'm thankful for it. Our poverty keeps us pure."
That's Tim Green of RATTLE from a recent blog post of his called POETRY IS NOT A RACKET.
Mr. Green's wonderful, fragrant aroma of self-regard and poetry protectionism can be found on his blog: http://www.timothy-green.org/ And I never fail to be irritated by poets proclaiming there's artistic purity in the valleys of obscurity.
It's a given that, in an America which chooses to treat poetry as something equivalent to the foods that children are forced to eat because they're "good for you," poetry is generally not going to sell in mass quantities. And, when it does, the knives tend to come out--with Billy Collins now being a new target of literary scorn. (How much of this is jealousy and how much a referendum on Collins' continuing worth as a writer post-success may never be totally quantifiable.)
But it would be nice to see small press poetry volumes try to sell more poets' works in, say, the multiple-thousands--or at least see more poets-published-by-small-press' works available in bookstores of their hometowns (noticing, for example, that Brendan Constantine's LETTERS TO GUNS isn't easy to find in L.A. bookstores--indie or corporate).
[UPDATE 7/13/11: here's a comment from cfisher:
Tim Green also spams you if you submit to his journal. (Although to be fair, I think 99.5% of these obscure and useless journals do that now.) To me, that shows how little these journals respect their writers. But Green is quite upfront about it: he actually says that if you don't want the spam, don't submit!
Well okay then, no problem!
As for Billy Collins, I wrote to him once and never received a reply, and thought it was kind of dickish.]
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