Technology conferences are fun, but exhausting. Today I headed back to the office, where life is relatively calm though sadly bereft of hourly snack breaks. After two solid days of networking, elevator speeches, marketing pitches, and attentive manners (you never know who’s watching), it felt good to sit at my desk, pick through my email, and run my fingers through my hair with wild abandon.
On that note, today, let’s talk about poetry. Fifty years ago, the poet Robert Graves said “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.” Does this quote still hold true?
Is there money in poetry? These days, money can be made in anything that is aptly marketed. Look at how the movie Beowulf, based on a 1000-year old poem, is making piles of cash at the box office. Even poems that aren’t visually aided by CGI or Angelina Jolie can perhaps benefit from Ruth Lilly’s bonanza $200 million donation to Poetry magazine. Here is the obligatory “what would W.H. Auden say?” quote: “It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.”
As to whether there’s literally money in poetry, well, poetry rarely discusses money. It’s just not poetic or, frankly, cool. John Ashberry has an early poem called ‘The Instruction Manual’ (here), where he laments having to write a technical manual because he much prefers staring out the window and day-dreaming about Guadalajara. The poem is widely accepted to be about the power of the imagination to fulfil desire. But to me, who relates deeply to the writer of the instruction manual, this incredibly sad poem is about money.
So, the more complicated question: is there poetry in money? Money, like a poem, is a human invention that articulates a primitive instinct. I see that there is poetry in anything, just so long as the thoughts breath, the words burn, and last line unties a knot in the reader’s soul.
