My impression is that the rewards to poetry vary from one culture to another, and the US takes poetry less seriously than any other culture I’ve heard of.
Khalil Gibran would have become rich if he had lived another 40 years. Rod McKuen has also done very well. Both did so primarily in the American market.
Wait, is getting really rich the standard? Because not all languages are equal in their ability to ring this bell at any given time. Right now, English is king—its the lingua franca of half the world or more, and has a disproportionate number of populous rich countries using it as their first language—America is conspicuously important in this regard.
Writers in other languages are at a severe disadvantage in terms of ability to cash in on their local popularity and influence. I understand that Russia, for instance, takes poetry very, very seriously; but its legal and economic system is not capable of giving its poets their honors in the form of money. For example, Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a big deal, and he’s not starving as far as I can tell. But neither does he make anything like a tenth of what cheesy American hack (not hacker—the bad, journalistic kind of hack) Dan Brown makes.
Speaking of Dan Brown—he’s a huge financial success, but he’s the non-thinking man’s version of Umberto Eco, who, from a financial point of view, made the extremely unwise decisions to be Italian and not to pander to the lowest common denominator among his potential readers.
Historically poets sometimes made large sums of money:
“One of the first authors to successfully take advantage of the statute was Alexander Pope, who became the equivalent of a millionaire by writing his own verse translation of The Iliad (between 1715 and 1720) and The Odyssey (in 1726). By 1727 Pope made more than £8000, the equivalent of about $12 million today and the largest sum an English author had ever received for their work. But stories of wealthy 18th century authors are rare. Since few people were literate, and fewer still were at leisure to read literature, there was little monetary incentive for professional authors to write it.”
And less scientifically, some cultures had traditions of court poets being paid large sums—I seem to recall some Arabic poems speaking of the poet’s “mouth being stuffed with gold” by the caliph for their ghazals, and Scandinavian skalds could be rewarded with substantial amounts of gold for a good drapa.
Who’s wealthy in the present? Well, that’s a little harder. In the Anglosphere, I’d wonder what the net wealth of Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost are/were, since they seem to be some of the rare crossover successes. (I’d exclude Wallace Stevens since being an insurance executive probably paid pretty well.)
It’s worth noting that patronage is still a viable strategy in some areas; here’s one living painter you’ve never heard of who is estimated to be worth $114 million (and was not born or married into wealth). (Damien Hirst, who you have heard of, is somewhere around $350 million.)
In the novel Catch 22, Ex-PFC Wintergreen responds to this assertion with a cryptic anonymous phone call. “T.S. Elliot” says Wintergreen.
I just had a look at the Wikipedia page for Elliot. It seems he won the Nobel prize in Literature about the time Heller was writing the novel. A Nobel brings with it a nice hunk of change.
My favorite poet! Or at least, author of my single favorite poem (“Little Gidding”—W.B. Yeats is my all-round favorite).
I don’t know Eliot’s net worth, and he wasn’t starving, certainly, but I don’t believe that he was vying for any of the “wealthiest people in the world” lists, like Rowling and some other writers can.
My point is that the original assertion is basically untrue: success in poetry is not a reliable way to amass wealth. Very good poets—those who publish in prestigious journals like, well, Poetry, or who can get books of poetry published and read—usually still need day jobs. They are often supported by university positions.
I love poetry, but a would-be poet needs a back-up plan, and “making it big” in poetry means ekeing out a middle-class living, as opposed to other fields where making it big can mean multimillions.
I know, they don’t count as “poets”, but then, what good is a category drawn to include abstruse verse that no one cares about, but excludes verse set to music that people go herdlike over?
It’s a real world category with real world consequences… seems silly to try and scrap it.
Take away the music (retroactively), and those artists would also be payed peanuts. Also, take away what little “poetry” you might find in Gaga, and you’ll get Kesha or Fergie. And still get paid mountains.
So long as the category isn’t defined by the lack of pay, and it really does point to a very distinct cluster of personspace (poet vs. pop star), it seems ridiculous to erase the border.
It’s a real world category with real world consequences… seems silly to try and scrap it.
Like with any category, it depends on the purpose you’re using it for. And I don’t know what purpose this category boundary would be for other than, “I don’t like my work being associated with Lady Gaga, so I’ll deem pop music ‘not poetry’.”
Song lyrics aren’t just by pop stars, and (as with any art form) there’s a huge range of quality.
There’s a poet who’s no longer speaking to me, and one of the many reasons is that I said song lyrics counted as poetry. I wish I could be sure of what she said on the subject, but I think is was that people are willing to repeatedly listen to the same song in a way that they aren’t willing to listen to spoken poetry or read poetry. I don’t know whether this is a reasonable distinction.
Nor whether a culture losing the centrality of spoken and read poetry is important, or whether rap (which has a distinctive presentation that’s neither singing nor speech) should be reasonably counted as poetry, song (rap music occupies the same cultural niche as melodicly based music), or something else.
For that matter, I don’t know whether ancient poetry (Homer, the sagas) was typically declaimed or chanted.
Reality may have joints in this area that it can be cut at, but I don’t know how to identify them.
We’re talking about having a superset term in common, not implied endorsement. Yes, you have the duty to accept that your work and Lady Gaga fall under the category “human culture”, and if you want to cleave that category just so you don’t have to share it with her, you need a much better reason than politics.
We’re talking about having a superset term in common, not implied endorsement
I don’t buy it. This issue isn’t about semantics, it’s about status. You evidently disapprove of the status being granted by the academic/critical elite to certain poets relative to Lady Gaga. But as far as I can tell you haven’t confronted their reasons for preferring “high poetry” to Gaga, instead simply taking it for granted that their reasons are inadequate.
The way to argue your case is to give an example of a poem that the establishment thinks is good and that you think is bad, explain why you think it’s bad, and explain why their argument that it’s good is wrong.
Anyone who talks about poetry having lack of market success without considering rap to be poetry is defining their terms to get their result. Failing that, they need to set out precisely how it fails to be poetry.
How does rap fail to be poetry? Please show your working.
The usual style of complaint is that their favoured style of poetry is not sufficiently popular. Compare any fan of an out-of-favour style of anything complaining that no-one is interested in real X any more, therefore society has descended into philistinism. This is only slightly a caricature.
How does rap fail to be poetry? Please show your working.
For me, the deciding factor for finding a rap song enjoyable is almost always the music and is very rarely the words. I’ve also noticed that the semantic content of the words is fairly unimportant, but what is important is how the words sound (I think this is sometimes referred to as the rapper’s “flow”). I’m not a poetry buff, but I take it that what the words mean is fairly important for a poem.
Here’s an example (music video, lyrics NSFW). If you look up the lyrics to this song they’re completely inane, but the beat is incredible and the words flow together well. The point of the work seems to be different from that of a poem.
The few who really master poetry are still paid peanuts. There is no Stephen King or J.K. Rowling of poetry.
My impression is that the rewards to poetry vary from one culture to another, and the US takes poetry less seriously than any other culture I’ve heard of.
Khalil Gibran would have become rich if he had lived another 40 years. Rod McKuen has also done very well. Both did so primarily in the American market.
Is there a poet overseas who has gotten really rich from their work?
Wait, is getting really rich the standard? Because not all languages are equal in their ability to ring this bell at any given time. Right now, English is king—its the lingua franca of half the world or more, and has a disproportionate number of populous rich countries using it as their first language—America is conspicuously important in this regard.
Writers in other languages are at a severe disadvantage in terms of ability to cash in on their local popularity and influence. I understand that Russia, for instance, takes poetry very, very seriously; but its legal and economic system is not capable of giving its poets their honors in the form of money. For example, Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a big deal, and he’s not starving as far as I can tell. But neither does he make anything like a tenth of what cheesy American hack (not hacker—the bad, journalistic kind of hack) Dan Brown makes.
Speaking of Dan Brown—he’s a huge financial success, but he’s the non-thinking man’s version of Umberto Eco, who, from a financial point of view, made the extremely unwise decisions to be Italian and not to pander to the lowest common denominator among his potential readers.
Historically poets sometimes made large sums of money:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/stateofpublishing/authors.html
And less scientifically, some cultures had traditions of court poets being paid large sums—I seem to recall some Arabic poems speaking of the poet’s “mouth being stuffed with gold” by the caliph for their ghazals, and Scandinavian skalds could be rewarded with substantial amounts of gold for a good drapa.
Who’s wealthy in the present? Well, that’s a little harder. In the Anglosphere, I’d wonder what the net wealth of Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost are/were, since they seem to be some of the rare crossover successes. (I’d exclude Wallace Stevens since being an insurance executive probably paid pretty well.)
It’s worth noting that patronage is still a viable strategy in some areas; here’s one living painter you’ve never heard of who is estimated to be worth $114 million (and was not born or married into wealth). (Damien Hirst, who you have heard of, is somewhere around $350 million.)
In the novel Catch 22, Ex-PFC Wintergreen responds to this assertion with a cryptic anonymous phone call. “T.S. Elliot” says Wintergreen.
I just had a look at the Wikipedia page for Elliot. It seems he won the Nobel prize in Literature about the time Heller was writing the novel. A Nobel brings with it a nice hunk of change.
My favorite poet! Or at least, author of my single favorite poem (“Little Gidding”—W.B. Yeats is my all-round favorite).
I don’t know Eliot’s net worth, and he wasn’t starving, certainly, but I don’t believe that he was vying for any of the “wealthiest people in the world” lists, like Rowling and some other writers can.
My point is that the original assertion is basically untrue: success in poetry is not a reliable way to amass wealth. Very good poets—those who publish in prestigious journals like, well, Poetry, or who can get books of poetry published and read—usually still need day jobs. They are often supported by university positions.
I love poetry, but a would-be poet needs a back-up plan, and “making it big” in poetry means ekeing out a middle-class living, as opposed to other fields where making it big can mean multimillions.
Worth quoting:
P. Diddy, Lady Gaga …
I know, they don’t count as “poets”, but then, what good is a category drawn to include abstruse verse that no one cares about, but excludes verse set to music that people go herdlike over?
It’s a real world category with real world consequences… seems silly to try and scrap it.
Take away the music (retroactively), and those artists would also be payed peanuts. Also, take away what little “poetry” you might find in Gaga, and you’ll get Kesha or Fergie. And still get paid mountains.
So long as the category isn’t defined by the lack of pay, and it really does point to a very distinct cluster of personspace (poet vs. pop star), it seems ridiculous to erase the border.
Like with any category, it depends on the purpose you’re using it for. And I don’t know what purpose this category boundary would be for other than, “I don’t like my work being associated with Lady Gaga, so I’ll deem pop music ‘not poetry’.”
And that’s not a good enough reason.
Song lyrics aren’t just by pop stars, and (as with any art form) there’s a huge range of quality.
There’s a poet who’s no longer speaking to me, and one of the many reasons is that I said song lyrics counted as poetry. I wish I could be sure of what she said on the subject, but I think is was that people are willing to repeatedly listen to the same song in a way that they aren’t willing to listen to spoken poetry or read poetry. I don’t know whether this is a reasonable distinction.
Nor whether a culture losing the centrality of spoken and read poetry is important, or whether rap (which has a distinctive presentation that’s neither singing nor speech) should be reasonably counted as poetry, song (rap music occupies the same cultural niche as melodicly based music), or something else.
For that matter, I don’t know whether ancient poetry (Homer, the sagas) was typically declaimed or chanted.
Reality may have joints in this area that it can be cut at, but I don’t know how to identify them.
Why not? Is there some sort of duty to accept the association of one’s work with Lady Gaga against one’s wishes?
We’re talking about having a superset term in common, not implied endorsement. Yes, you have the duty to accept that your work and Lady Gaga fall under the category “human culture”, and if you want to cleave that category just so you don’t have to share it with her, you need a much better reason than politics.
I don’t buy it. This issue isn’t about semantics, it’s about status. You evidently disapprove of the status being granted by the academic/critical elite to certain poets relative to Lady Gaga. But as far as I can tell you haven’t confronted their reasons for preferring “high poetry” to Gaga, instead simply taking it for granted that their reasons are inadequate.
The way to argue your case is to give an example of a poem that the establishment thinks is good and that you think is bad, explain why you think it’s bad, and explain why their argument that it’s good is wrong.
Yes, I hold those beliefs. I wasn’t advancing them in this thread, and they aren’t necessary for me to make the point I’m making in this thread.
Anyone who talks about poetry having lack of market success without considering rap to be poetry is defining their terms to get their result. Failing that, they need to set out precisely how it fails to be poetry.
How does rap fail to be poetry? Please show your working.
The usual style of complaint is that their favoured style of poetry is not sufficiently popular. Compare any fan of an out-of-favour style of anything complaining that no-one is interested in real X any more, therefore society has descended into philistinism. This is only slightly a caricature.
I don’t even like rap and this one’s glaring.
For me, the deciding factor for finding a rap song enjoyable is almost always the music and is very rarely the words. I’ve also noticed that the semantic content of the words is fairly unimportant, but what is important is how the words sound (I think this is sometimes referred to as the rapper’s “flow”). I’m not a poetry buff, but I take it that what the words mean is fairly important for a poem.
Here’s an example (music video, lyrics NSFW). If you look up the lyrics to this song they’re completely inane, but the beat is incredible and the words flow together well. The point of the work seems to be different from that of a poem.