Sturgeon's Law

Poetry is marginal, poetry is fragmented, poetry doesn't matter, poetry is dying. Good goddamn thing too. Where else in the arts do you get to do virtually whatever you want without having to worry about selling out and going mainstream because you really need/want the cash? What do sellouts get in poetry? A $5,000 prize? Tenure? Non-sellouts have those things too, and my job still pays more than yours. Any kind of serious money doesn't roll in until retirement age, and even then only one poet in 10,000 gets it. You want to sell out, get an MBA or a JD. You want to sell out as an artist and get something for it, be a musician or painter. If you're a halfway decent writer, there are dozens of journals that will publish whatever kind of poetry is yours, so figure out what kind is yours and write the hell out of it. And please shut the fuck up when you feel that impulse to insult the kind that isn't yours, or bitch about how someone else has a bigger piece of pie. The pie is neither good nor big.

It's funny that I continue to write poetry despite the fact that very few of the alleged perks of the poetry world really interest me. I don't want to teach, and I'm less and less inclined to seek an MFA after I got to hear work by some of the people who got into schools ahead of me the last couple of years. I've never applied for a grant, and I don't have a month free for your writer's colony, thank you. I only like conferences because I get to meet people I've known online, and occasionally completely new people I keep track of. And though I joke from time to time that I write poetry to impress women, that's a sadly hit-or-miss affair at best. I write poetry and I publish and I edit because these things let me believe for a short time that I can create something beautiful or moving, by myself or in collaboration with other writers/editors, and share it with people to make them a little happier. When I start cranking out, I dunno, bad Harry Potter knockoffs, you'll know I started following other motivations. Though I'd still need to be making people happy.