Aid To Dependant Poets

By Mark Worden

From the beginning I had all the qualifications for the occupation of author: Obscurity, penury, and, I hoped, honesty, to which I would add ill hap, for he who is not enticed by the siren, misfortune, is a poltroon.
—Edward Dahlberg

There are savages in Africa who give beads of wealth and honor to the singers that entertain them, but they bury them upside down in a hollow tree, to show that the honor is not unmixed with contempt. I sometimes think the singers of our day have a similarly compounded attitude toward themselves.
For while they consider a life of self-realization so self-justifying as to warrant their renouncing for it every aspiration of an acting man, they still descend from this to complain that they are not appreciated by others, as though they had not their own reward.
—Max Eastman, The Pleasures of Poetry

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that is read by persons who move their lips when they are reading to themselves.
—Don Marquis

Poets are born, not paid.
—Contemporary Proverb

I do not believe a single modern English poet is living today on the current proceeds of his verse.
—Arnold Bennett

A few years ago, being properly poetically penurious and bardically broke, like most poets and other literary folk, I stopped by the welfare cheese distribution outlet and picked up my five-pound block of Velveeta. Or pseudo-Velveeta. Talk about your yuks and yyeeechchches: It was a hideous concoction of yellow dye, curdled milk and salt—equal parts—and miscellaneous additives. It resembled cheese as much as polyvinyl chloride resembles, say, Chateubriand or tenderloin steak. (Or boletus edulus for the vegans in the house.) In other words, this stuff was not “cheese” in the traditional sense—in the sense that a turophile would recognize it. No kin to Edam or Tillamook cheddar. Nor to longhorn, Swiss, roquefort, cambembert, Brie or limburger. What I had on my hands was a five-pound block of something else.
It was “welfarecheese.”

Even my dog sensed a scam. I threw a piece of welfarecheese into Wolfgang’s dish. He trotted over, dragging his dachshundish length along. He sniffed at the yellow mass in his dish, turned and walked away, giving me that soft-eyed reproachful look he uses when he thinks I’ve hoaxed him or done him wrong.

“Okay,” you say, “great cheese story. Wonderful. But what’s the point?”

Simple. It goes like this: Once upon a time, it was seen to be in the best interests of our country—read “the dairy industry”—to prop up flagging milk and dairy product prices. As part of that tradition of price supports, the dairy lobby convinced congress to make available to the nation’s poor over 100 million pounds of surplus cheese.

Make that “welfarecheese.”

The welfarecheese giveaway was prompted by economics, not by concern for the malnourished. So forget about your naive notions of supply and demand economics. It’s myth, sheer myth.

What counts is clout. And the dairy industry has clout. The dairy lobby has mapped out a successful strategy, one worthy of emulation: Create a government supported guaranteed market for your products.

Now there are thousands of poets across the country who are out of work and who are in dire need of economic support. We give millions for Dairy Lobbies and other sacred pentagonal cows, but not an iota for verse. What meager iota are meted out go, as usual, to the haves—to those who need it least. To academic deadwood mulling over Ezra Pound’s execrable Cantos or Charles Olson’s Maximus. Or milking the Wasteland for one more esoteric remote association to explicate. Grants (and we’re talking money, now, not welfarecheese) go to full professors of Blakean imagery and Coleridgean metaphysics. To students of Olsonian projectivity and Creelyesque minimalism and Blyistic deep metaphor. To pale, wan and self-destructive Sextonian and Plathian bibliographers.

Other iota go go to friends of friends in the poetry biz, to quondam bards teaching metaphor to youth or scansion to housewives and convicts.

But it is rumored that poets themselves need support. Poets—actual practitioners of the lyric art, the haiku and quintain—poets deserve, the argument goes, economic support for their valiant and selfless efforts to keep Western Civilization alive.

Why, then, shouldn’t the government step in and bolster the poetry industry with price supports for the same way the dairy industry has been subsidized for milk products?

As a first step, the government should inaugurate a poetry giveaway program that would make verse available to the nation’s poor in spirit and culturally deprived.

In short, the feds should buy up surplus poetry and distribute it like welfarecheese.

Think about it. The dairy industry got a lot of mileage out of the slogan, “Every body needs milk.”

Think about the enormous impact the poetry industry could have on society with the slogan, “Everbody (and Soul) Needs Poetry.”

Welfarepoetry is not the only solution to the economic woes of the poetry industry. The economics of Poetry demands a multifaceted approach.

Consider this useful precedent set by the nation’s booming legal and proprietary drug industry. A few years ago, at the last minute Congress passed an “orphan drug bill,” which gives tax breaks to drug companies that develop special medicines—drugs that are not profitable to manufacture—for roughly 2,000 rare and debilitating diseases that afflict some 20 million Americans.

Poets and their lobbyists should work to get an “orphan poem bill” introduced in Congress. Such legislation would give tax breaks to those who purchase poetry, to those who publish poetry and to patrons. There are at least 2,000 rare and debilitating poems afflicting myriads of our country’s finest poets.

Finally, any aid measure should take into account the truly dependent poet—the gravid versifier, the poet who is, as it were, “heavy with verse.” A primary criterion of a poet’s dependency is his inability to survive by selling verse on the open market. But it should not be deemed necessary for a poet to actually write verse to qualify as dependent, for that would place those who are “heavy with poetry” at a singular disadvantage.

As everyone knows there is a variable gestation period for the production, or birth, of a work of art. For some poets, it is a matter of minutes or hours. For others the writing of even a few lines or finding a precise expression may take weeks, months or years, during which the tortured artist writhes with truth and grapples with beauty.

In fairness, then, the government must support those who talk about writing poetry. It is well known that garrulity (some have uncharitably called it whining) about the difficulty of writing is a major symptom of creative gestation or incubation.

Naturally there will be critics of these proposals. They will cavil and contend that government support will weaken the fiercely competitive spirit of the artist. Others will argue that subsidies and welfare will create nothing but an abundance of bad writing.

To such critics I reply that government support has clearly not weakened the resolve or fiercely competitive spirit of the dairy industry. (A few years ago the government decided to reduce the number of dairy farms and, with big bucks, persuaded many dairy farmers to sell their herds. Many of these enterprising dairy farmers banked the bucks and bought new herds.) 

True, there is already an abundance of bad writing. But why should poets be denied their contribution to today’s abundance of bad writing simply because they cannot find a market. Besides, paying poets to think about writing poetry may actually reduce the abundance of bad writing because journalists who are closet poets might cease writing bad prose if given the chance to write, or even think about writing, welfarepoetry.

Indeed, welfare has never threatened the poet’s survival. Poets, like other artists whose work remains caviar to the general, have always sought patronage—from individuals, corporation and governments. Consistent with the ideals of Democracy, welfarepoetry simply makes this patronage available to a broader spectrum of artists.

Wefarepoetry assuredly poses no hazard to the State or to the Artist. The true poet, I say, can even endure subsidy and the carefree, leisurely and abundant life that federal subsidy inexorably brings.

At any rate, it is hard to believe—nay, it is inconceivable—that welfarepoetry could be one-half as noxious, one-tenth as deadly and debilitating, as welfarecheese.

“In my section, all Litterateurs are (generally) despised. A fourth rate lawyer, a hundredth rate politician would rank above the truest and noblest of Poets. . . I have worked for 20 years without advice, sympathy, or help of any kind.”
     —Paul Hamilton Haynes.  [In 1875 Haynes reported that in his native city of Charleston, SC, the people “with tremendous effort have succeeded” in ordering fifteen copies of his poems. —Van Wyck Brooks]