Poetry is
fine, poetry is
good, but poetry won't
pay the rent. I
lamentably discovered that people didn't really buy very much
poetry a few years ago. At the time, I simply
assumed that one could
make a living by writing poetry, without the need to work a
second job. This was cleared up for me quite quickly when my
agent informed me that there was
no chance in hell of making enough money to live off of, unless I was either extremely
prolific and
popular -- to the tune of two or three collections a year. The point was
driven home when a
poet from the west of
Canada gave a lecture at my school, prefacing it with the
lovely phrase, "If you want money, do anything but poetry.". He then went on to detail how he'd never had
time to write
poetry until his
retirement, because what
modest success he had had hadn't even covered the
rent for the time he'd needed to
write. He also took time to
mention how much he
loved what he was doing, even if it had taken him a long
time to get around to it.
To put things into
perspective: a best-selling collection from a new poet will probably run to about fifty thousand sales. In particularly
exceptional cases, it might come close to one hundred thousand. A best-selling
novel from a new
author, however, could tower up past a million sales. As well,
publicity and
book tours are much easier to arrange for a novel, meaning that there is less
promotional overhead to deal with.
Despite all of this, one cannot help but
notice that the average
person can name several
poets from years-gone-by, but will
struggle with novelists.
John Grisham will probably not be remembered in a hundred years, but maybe
Anne Michaels will be. So, perhaps writing a
novel is your best chance for turning a
profit, and writing
poetry is your best chance for
posterity. Of course, that's somewhat
inaccurate, as prose did not always
dominate the literary
market in the manner that it now does. However, writing a
single brilliant poem could leave you in the
Oxford Anthology of Verse, where you will be
mis-interpreted by schoolchildren for many years to come. Writing a single brilliant paragraph in a
novel seldom brings such
lauding.
In conclusion, professionally penning
poetry isn't an excellent
career decision. I have my
doubts that anybody thinks that it would be. Regardless, you can always
temp to support yourself.