Poetry? It’s a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.
It’s not work. You don’t sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.
– Basil Bunting, “What the Chairman Told Tom”
We all know that poetry doesn’t pay. Those who have dedicated their lives to the verbal art have had to take up day jobs to pay the bills. Starving in a garret is not really all that common, despite Romantic clichés. In fact, some of these jobs are quite remunerative – that well-off insurance executive Wallace Stevens could tell you that. But it’s a fair assumption that nobody embarks on the serious pursuit of poetry with the intention of getting rich.
So imagine my surprise when I picked up Calvert Watkins’ exhaustive study of Indo-European poetics, How to Kill a Dragon, and found this statement: “one simple socioeconomic fact is clear: the Indo-European poet was the highest-paid professional in his society.” Watkins was a Harvard classicist and historical linguist, so presumably he knew what he was talking about. Perhaps I just got lost in the dense thicket of quotes in Hittite, Greek, Latin, Irish, Sanskrit and other languages that fill the pages of his immense treatise, but I failed to find any firm confirmation of this statement. If ancient Indo-European payment orders exist, shouldn’t we get to see them?
More seriously, Watkins points out that the poet had a patron – usually a king or aristocrat – who was able to bestow wealth on the poet in exchange for the poet’s unique gift of “imperishable fame.” While this isn’t terribly specific in terms of remuneration, it does show the importance of the poet in the early Indo-European social structure. As Watkins says, “poetry and poets were not a ‘frill’ in Indo-European society but a necessity of life.”
However, the Indo-European poet didn’t have to compete with TV and YouTube and music on tap 24 hours a day. He had the benefits of a patron and a captive audience. Making poetry fashionable and even profitable again, in a world of rampant consumerism and multiple distractions, seems like a wistful dream nowadays.
Martin Amis captured this dream in his short story “Career Move.” In this alternate world, poets and screenwriters trade places. Alistair the screenwriter ekes out a living pitching his screenplays to literary magazines with tiny circulations, all the while desperately trying to get editors to pay attention to him. It takes forever for Alistair to get his screenplay Offensive from Quasar 13 published, and the material rewards are meager indeed: “Three months later he was sent a proof of Offensive from Quasar 13. Three months after that, the screenplay appeared in the Little Magazine. Three months after that, Alistair received a check for £12.50, which bounced.”
By contrast, when Luke the poet finishes his sonnet, entitled “Sonnet,” he shops it around various Hollywood studios. The creatives think “Sonnet” will be a big hit, but the path of development is long and twisty:
“He had taken his sonnet to Rodge at Red Giant and turned it into an ode. When that didn't work out he went to Mal at Monad, where they'd gone for the villanelle. The villanelle had become a triolet, briefly, with Tim at TCT, before Bob at Binary had him rethink it as a rondeau. When the rondeau didn't take, Luke lyricized it and got Mike to send it to Joe. Everyone, including Jake Endo, thought that now was surely the time to turn it back into a sonnet.”
Yes, the creative process can be frustrating, but being a poet has its compensations: you stay in the best hotels, get all the attention you need, and of course, fly first class (“First class was no big thing. In poetry, first class was something you didn't need to think about… First class was just business as usual”).
Since then, the renamed Poetry Foundation has built itself an elegant, sparely modernistic new headquarters – reflecting perhaps its pathbreaking role in modernist verse – and increased its remuneration for poets. As of 2007, two dollars per line had turned into ten. Prizes are awarded, up to the amount of $5000. But this probably still leaves a heap of money to be paid out – possibly enough to satisfy even Indo-European poets. How about it, Poetry Foundation – can you make poetry lucrative again?