Why Doesn't Poetry Sell, January 22, 2008

Why Doesn’t Poetry Sell

I’ve taught writing for nearly 20 years, so I’m well aware of the fact that it is considered poor form to give your conclusion before making your argument. In this case, however, I’m making an exception. Why doesn’t poetry sell? I don’t know, or more precisely, I don’t understand, why poetry doesn’t sell.

I’ve had plenty of reasons offered to me. It’s too intellectual or too obtuse. It’s irrelevant or indecent. It’s too expensive or poorly marketed. And my favorite, there just isn’t a market, i.e. no one is interested in poetry. I could argue passionately against the veracity of any of these reasons, but today I’ll present a coldly logical case against only one, the last one.

First, a bit of perspective, to help you understand what I mean by “not selling.” I’ve had two collections of poetry printed. The first one sold about 1200 copies, and the second, just released last August, is nearing 1000 copies. That’s a smashing success in the minds of most poets and an abysmal failure in the minds of every other kind of writer. Even the best-selling collections of contemporary poetry, say Billy Collins’ The Trouble with Poetry, max out around 10,000 copies. Fiction best sellers, on the other hand, routinely reach 6 digits and occasionally exceed a million copies.

Those numbers make clear that, relative to other types of writing, poetry doesn’t sell, and I’ve already told you that I don’t know why. Now I’ll explain why I don’t believe the argument that poetry doesn’t sell because there is no market for it.

My reason for not believing this depends upon simple, albeit admittedly specious, math. Given the number of colleges and universities in NC, CVCC and Lenoir Rhyne can be seen as a correlative representation of the population of Catawba and Alexander counties. The creative writing classes I teach at CVCC average 20 students per year, half of whom are consistently interested in writing poetry. The numbers are similar at Lenoir Rhyne. Given an average life expectancy of 70 years, that means at any one time there are approximately 1400 people in the two counties who are interested enough in writing poetry to take a class in it. It seems reasonable to expect that those 1400 people would buy a copy of the one or two new books of poetry that come out of their county each year. I buy about 30 books of poetry each year, myself.

Combined with the 500 or so people from outside the two counties that have bought a copy of my most recent book, if the 1400 poetry-lovers in Catawba and Alexander County had bought a copy, then I should have sold closer to 2000 copies so far. Similarly, if the ratio of poetry-class-takers to overall population holds true across the country, then the poetry best sellers should have no difficulty approaching the million copies mark as well. According to this figuring, then, poetry should sell.

I’ve read that only poets buy poetry these days. Unfortunately, however, even this appears not to be the case. Even if only those who express an interest in writing poetry bought poetry regularly, say once a month, then poetry would clearly have a solid market. I’ve heard the death of poetry pronounced more times than I can count, and obviously, it’s still here. But if poetry is not important enough to shake the money tree of even those who appear to care about poetry, then who can say to what depths of obscurity and penury the poets of tomorrow might sink?