What is ‘make a living’?

“Would you be up for discussing a time you made money from poetry?” Timothy Yu’s answer to my question, the first in a series of complicated and generous responses, troubles both terms. How does money figure in an economy where publishing is a break-even venture at best? How does one come to and claim the identity of ‘poet’? When there is money for poetry, where does it come from (or not)? And given the interdependence of contemporary literature and higher education, how does poetry’s value adhere within the academic labor market? Yu maps these questions and the difficulty of imagining a solution to the dilemma embedded within them, one that will come up again and again this month: the relation of work and writing, of ‘making a living.’

—Stephanie Young

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The handful of times I’ve earned any money from my own poetry have all happened, as far as I can remember, within the past year.  The publisher of my first book, 100 Chinese Silences, sent me a pre-publication honorarium check, along with a note apologizing for its smallness.  A reading I did with several other Kundiman poets at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago came with a small honorarium from Kundiman, along with a slightly larger one from SAIC that the organizer didn’t find out about until a few days before the reading.  And then there was the check that came along with my publication in Poetry, large enough that I did a double take at the amount.

My reaction to all of these payments would probably be best described as “pleasant surprise,” because I’ve always thought of poetry as something that basically never pays.  I assumed that being paid for a poem was a shocking anomaly.  But maybe I was wrong?

I should probably say from the start that I’m someone who still feels a bit of an outsider to the poetry world, even if it wouldn’t necessarily look that way at first glance.  Although I’ve always written poetry, it was only in the last few years that I felt able to claim the identity of “poet,” a shift that I can basically attribute to two factors: my discovery of a community of Asian American writers (particularly through Kundiman) and the writing and publication of my first book (which I feel pretty certain had the first factor as a necessary condition).  Although I took a few creative writing workshops as an undergrad, after college I chose to pursue a Ph.D. in American literature rather than applying to MFA programs.  So although I am now an English professor, my professional identity has been that of a scholar of contemporary poetry rather than a practitioner of it.  This is all to say that I’m the first to acknowledge that my understanding of the economy of contemporary poetry is more that of an arm’s-length observer than that of an actively publishing poet, much less that of an editor or publisher.

To compensate for my relative lack of experience, I did what I always do these days when I have a tough question: ask Facebook.

My query produced a surprisingly lengthy list of paying venues, from American Poetry Review to The Nation.  Perhaps more importantly, in contrast to my rather resigned assumption that poetry just doesn’t pay, most of the comments reflected at least an implicit sense that poets should be paid for journal publication; several commenters pointed me to Jessica Piazza’s Poetry Has Value, documenting her commitment to submitting only to paying venues.

So how do we reconcile this sense that poetry should pay with the fact that in general, it doesn’t—that despite the best intentions of editors, most journals don’t pay contributors, and that even when journals do pay, the amount (though certainly appreciated) is likely to be only a token?  What relationship does this sense that poetry should pay have to the actual economy of contemporary U.S. poetry?

It certainly has not been the case in recent history (let’s just say the past century at least) that most American poets have been able to earn anything resembling a reliable income from their work.  I think of this every time I read A River of Words, a wonderful picture book about William Carlos Williams, to my four-year-old daughter.  There’s a passage that says that although the young Williams loved to write poetry, “no one paid much money for poetry” and he “had to make a living.”  (My daughter’s question the last time we read it: “What is ‘make a living’?”)  The modernists all had day jobs (Dr. Williams, insurance executive Wallace Stevens, banker T.S. Eliot), lived more cheaply abroad (Ezra Pound) or with the benefit of family money (Gertrude Stein), or literally lived at home with their mothers (Marianne Moore).  (The lesson my daughter seems to have learned from the story of Williams is that she wants to be a doctor.)

Artists these days are frequently exhorted not to work for free (or, you know, for the exposure), but the logic behind that argument is one of economic exploitation: the presumption is that the person who hired you to make something is profiting at your expense.  Pretty much anyone involved with contemporary U.S. poetry, however, knows quite well that no one is making a profit, and that publishing poetry, whether in journal or book form, is much more likely to be a money-losing endeavor than a money-making one.  The vanishingly few general-interest magazines that still publish poetry, like the New Yorker and The Nation, do pay their contributors, but by and large poetry publishing has moved entirely out of the realm of profit-seeking enterprise into a non-profit economy.

Contemporary U.S. poets are thus accustomed to working within an economy in which the creative object—the poem itself—brings essentially no revenue to its creator.  Although the material forms that poems take—books, journal issues, anthologies—are still bought and sold as commodities, the income poets receive from the sale of such commodities is negligible, and the publishers who produce these commodities have little expectation of profit.  So one difference between the state of poetry-as-commodity at the beginning of the 20^th century and today is that, although certainly much great modern poetry was published by small presses, poetry publishing today has become ever-more detached from a mainstream marketplace, increasingly operating within a nearly sealed-off economy all its own.  (My remarks here are mostly confined to poets whose primary medium is print; poets whose primary medium is performance may operate within a different, if related, economy.)

One curious facet of this economy is that far from being regularly paid for their work, poets themselves are increasingly asked to subsidize the poetry economy by paying for the privilege of having their work read by editors.  The charging of reading fees for entering poetry book contests is a long-standing feature of the U.S. poetry world, but many journals have also begun to charge small reading fees for all submissions—a fact that has generated much debate.  I say this not to criticize reading fees, but simply to observe that they reflect an economy in which publishers of poetry have few other available sources of revenue with which to fund their operations, much less to pay contributors, and in which the vast number of poets seeking to gain access to publication makes the charging of fees viable.

I noted with interest that two of my friends who commented about being paid for poems were from Australia.  In many places outside the U.S., the eroding commodity marketplace for poetry has been supplemented primarily through state support for the arts.  I read earlier this week that the new Liberal government in Canada is doubling funding for the Canada Council for the Arts over the next five years.  State support not only subsidizes the publication of books and journals, but can offer grants that provide working artists with an income.  In comparison, U.S. state support for the arts is laughably small; even now, the Canada Council has a budget that is roughly equal to that of the National Endowment for the Arts, despite the fact that the U.S. population is nine times larger than that of Canada.  American editors and publishers are left to cobble together what grant money they can from both public and private sources; as one editor friend of mine put it, while most editors would like to pay authors, whether they can do so depends either on philanthropic or institutional support.

This last point leads us to the most distinctive feature of the contemporary U.S. poetry economy, one that has a complex relationship to the model of paying for poetry: the rise of academic creative writing as the main institutional home of American poetry.  In large part thanks to the rise of creative writing as an academic field, it does now seem possible to “make a living” as a poet—in the sense that one can become a professor of creative writing.  Today, pretty much all of the best-known and most “successful” poets in the U.S. hold or have held academic positions.  The brute fact, of course, is that there are far more degree-holding poets seeking academic jobs than there are jobs to be had.  But if the primary model for being a “professional poet” has become that of academic employment, the ideal of paying poets for their poems is likely to recede even farther.

Here’s an analogy: As a literature professor, I don’t get paid when I publish an article, and I am unlikely to see any kind of significant royalties from publishing a book.  This economy functions only because the assumption is that I am paid a salary by my university and that publishing my research is part of my job.  The academic economy is circular: academic journals and monographs are generally bought only by university libraries and read only by other academics, and the money that keeps this economy (precariously) running is provided either by grants or by universities themselves.

Has contemporary U.S. poetry become essentially a closed academic economy?  Well, yes and no.  Certainly it is true that more and more young poets are earning graduate degrees in creative writing and adopting academic employment as a major professional goal.  This trend probably pushes toward poetry publication continuing to be largely unpaid, or even subsidized by poets (just as many academic researchers must subsidize their own publications).  At the same time, there continues to be a vast poetic economy that is both outside of academia and isolated from commercial markets: small presses and journals that operate without institutional support.  Much of what is most exciting in contemporary poetry is going on within this space.  Yet it also seems the space that is least likely to be able to generate a sustainable economic model that leads to poets being paid for their poems.  The sense that poets should be paid is a likely factor in the ever-increasing prominence of contests with prize money, which do promise a substantial payoff to the winner, but not, of course, to all the other entrants (who instead are likely to realize a net loss due to entry fees).

So how do we reconcile the laudable ideal that poets should be paid for their poems with the realities of the poetic economy?  The examples of getting paid that I cited at the opening of my essay give a pretty good sense of the challenges involved: a small press paying a book author a small amount out of its own budget; a non-profit organization paying a small amount out of money that likely had to be raised from donors; an academic institution paying a somewhat larger amount; and, of course, the Poetry Foundation itself, which is very kindly paying me to write this very piece, but whose generosity is no doubt enabled by its one-of-a-kind endowment.  It’s difficult to see how a viable model of pay-for-poems would emerge from such an economy, since most of the imaginable positive trends—more philanthropic funding, more academic jobs, more state support for the arts—seem like they would tend to lead not toward a model of payment for poems, but toward a model of a stable income for poets, whether through salaried employment or through grants and fellowships.

The demand that artists should be paid directly for individual works is an acknowledgement that in a market economy, the purchase of a work of art as a commodity is the best (perhaps only) way to mark art’s social value.  But if poetry is no longer part of such an economy (and hasn’t been for a long time), then maybe we can stop thinking about poems as a commodity (and an unprofitable one at that) and start thinking about poetry as a social good, and poets themselves as worthy of social investment.

In the meantime, though, let’s keep paying poets whenever and however we can.