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Why Is There No Money in Poetry?
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If we seek to find money
in poetry, will we find it? The question is not whether we should find
it, but whether or not, if our intention is to make money from poetry,
we will find it. Someone has made money from poetry in the past. Money
has changed hands. It may seem the only poets who have made money from
poetry were Robert Frost and A. E. Housman. It may seem that "The Road
Not Taken" and "When I Was one-and-twenty" have been tattooed on the
forehead of every school child for the last four generations. There are
hundreds of poems encountered by members of our culture in the course of
leading their lives: nursery rhymes, popular music, advertising
jingles, alliteration in jokes.
What is our intention in
writing poetry? Is it to "express ourselves"? Don't novelists
express themselves when they write their books? Is there no part of a
script of a Hollywood movie, no matter how formulaic, which is an
expression of the self of the screenwriter? If that is the case, if it
is possible for a person to spend a significant amount of her creative
time on a work-for-hire piece of work, and yet have no reflection of
herself other than the skill of the writing, are we to understand the
writing formula to be:
Self Expression = No Money
No Self Expression = The Possibility of Money
© Andrew Grossman
For reprints, contact:
licensing@andrewgrossman.net
616.551.2238
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