| |
|
As for my field - there's no money in verse. Which, of course, means a ton of creative freedom - as long as you're cool with that "creative freedom" happening in a less than perfect environment, to a small audience of mostly older people and mostly other poets and, to be honest, mostly your friends and relatives.
This absence of major money means that the art form, and the scene around it, moves much more slowly than popular music does - you have nothing like the exacting pressure placed on, say, Girls Aloud, or even an average pub rock band. If you screw up a line you get to start again. Except that this sometimes achingly slow turnover can lead to stagnation.
It is one of the few places where you do not have to be "cool" to go far. Except this tends to bring certain "types" out of the woodwork.
A lack of quality control is often evident. A lot of people who write poetry unfortunately don't seem to read very much of it. Or know anything about meter. Or public speech. This would stop a rapper, or a comedian (in terms of knowing the ground, being aware of your "ancestors"). Nice cardigans do not stop this from being a problem.
Coeval with the above, lack of youth can be a problem - in terms of the energy required for output and performance - but ... there are poetry readings specifically by/for younger authors. And they are unremittingly awful. Nobody needs to hear someone in camouflage trousers and a trenchcoat saying "Hey...Blair,/I don't...care", or "I don't read! I don't need to read/I'm a Soul poet", or "Another poet dies/There's blood on the streets/Because of Nazis telling lies". Another quality control issue.
A major feature of modern poetry has been a varied hacking away at one or several of the traditional assumptions of form, gentility, middle-class-ness, white-ness, and so on. Which I suppose is all well and good if you want ideologically sound poetry about I AM A WOMAN, YEAH, or I AM BLACK, YEAH, but it (I mean the formal challenges really rather than content, but that too) unfortunately means a base-line level of respect for the art has dissapeared into the ether.
That is, a lack of respect for the idea of creating a thing of beauty which is not really anything to do with the artist's life, opinions, economic theory or cultural studies. In 1880 a reading of poetry would have been attended to with a perhaps stifling seriousness on all parts, and unless the poet was French and about to die young the work would probably be sub-par. None-the-less the intention was there. Not so now. Now you expect to hear a dozen people wingeing about their ex-girlfriend or telling you not to vote for the BNP, man, yeah.
Which doesn't mean to say that there was big money in verse, even in 1880, and, of course, money is not the point of verse. The problem is that money is, at the moment, tied up with the vitality of any art. Look at classical music - for something that's a relatively minority interest, a lot of £s and $s splash about there.
There is, of course, funding, from the Arts Council, the National Lottery, and various other public sources - this is how most poetry publishers survive, because, and this is why Penguin do not publish new poetry, poetry can not be guaranteed to make a profit - they make up the loss with funding. Which is fine on the face of it, BUT, there are various bits of murky small-print about what a company has to do to get funding, a lot of which involves things like "presenting a positive image of life in contemporary britain" (yuck) and "avoiding elitism" (why does poetry get accused of this and not sport?). |
|
|
