Any reader in Britain, of serious literature, might be disheartened to learn that sales of the recently short-listed Booker novels are, for the most part, in the low thousands (one of them has sold around two thousand copies); meanwhile, most poetry collections sell less than a thousand copies. However - and this is the funny part - memoirs by comedians sell tens of thousands, making millions of pounds. Apparently, this year's Christmas season, which began in publishing on September 29, features a number of comedy books, which sellers hope will hit the jackpot. This may be fun on Christmas Day. It is not good for culture, however popular. The truth is, poetry has a particularly hard-sell in a culture, like Britain's, where the default setting is a guffaw, or chortle. Poetry can never compete with stand-up, for even when it is light and witty, it is not Comedy; nor is poetry sex, drugs or rock and roll - the other obsessions of the marketers who peddle to us. Comedy is a UK obsession, and, kept in its place, it is harmless good fun. But Comedy has infected the British psyche. Double-entendres, snickers, and cheap shots perforate and proliferate the fabric of our days. Lewd puns and madcap stunts riddle our evenings. With all the belly-aching jolly good fun, where is the time to sit quietly, and read (on Kindle or paper) a thoughtful work, that might demand actually having to feel deeper emotions, such as fear, loss, love, or empathy? Let us stop pretending that Poetry is popular. You measure the popular by how much it sells. The books that sell in the UK are by comedians.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?
Comments
Poetry used to sell in this country. Roger McGough's 'The Mersey Sound' (from memory) sold over a million copies in the 1970's. Then our cherished poetry editotrs in their infinite wisdom commenced and continued publishing stuff that was tedious, obscure, pretentious and self-regarding. Over the last thirty years they have done a thoroughly professional job of turning the British public right off poetry which is why even first-rate poets struggle to shift copies these days.
Best wishes from Simon
There is a difference between a popular interest and sales figures. The gap is caused by a lack of active engagement and participation. It is easy to participate in comedy: one tells a joke and wins a laugh or a wry smile, and example set by comedians encourages this engagement. It is rather harder to participate in poetry; the barriers to entry are in many senses much higher, and poets do very little to make them seem scalable.
I would suggest that comedy's financial success is partly due to the recent facilitation of mass public participation in comedy and comics' engagement with their fanbase (who are also their market). Poetry has different constraints, but the biggest thing holding poetry back is the failure of poetry educators and activists. Blaming the public or blaming the success of another art form is unhelpful at best. Society today is more reliant on text than it has ever been; internet social networking is almost exclusively text-based. How have we as poets failed to cash in on this attention, and what can we do to rectify the situation?