Poetry Market Quotes

I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

People who buy 'The National Enquirer' would buy poetry. They should be given a choice. I'm absolutely serious.

No one ever expects poetry to sell...

People think they're gonna make a living off poetry. Ten years ago, maybe a couple of people did. Right now, no one, I don't think.

I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.

I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example.

Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.