Elisa New: prediction

Transcript context

…Do you worry about the dominant economic role of the poetry anthology for generating royalties? If you’re a poet, as you know, it’s hard to sell a lot of book copies if you’re not, say, on Instagram with a lot of followers. You get a poem in one of the anthologies. That’s a fairly centralized market. Do we have a funny market structure for poetry, where there’s one part, far too centralized, run by anthologies, driven by classroom use — and then another part that’s a kind of Malthusian equilibrium. Everyone writing poetry on the internet. Hardly anyone earning anything. And then you have a few poets, driven by their celebrity status, who earn a lot of money. But it’s a feast-or-famine situation. There’s not a healthy middle of the market. In the arts, has there ever been a healthy middle of the market? Arts are not restaurants, right? [laughs] Restaurants — there’s the top, there’s the bottom, and there’s the middle. Artists have always depended on either patronage or somebody driven for love of something other than the art itself to get themselves distributed. I don’t think one becomes a poet in order to earn a living. I’m not sure there’s any poet — including Billy Collins, whom I like very much, and whose work I admire very much — who can earn a living writing poetry. Happily for our culture, what many of the great poets in the culture do is they teach, which I think is a really important role for creative people. Wallace Stevens worked for an insurance company.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.