empty basket

Each time I passed the poet busking in the square he seemed to be getting thinner.

burst bubble

When the poetry bubble burst no one lost any money.

store of value

Poetry is a lot like Bitcoin: It’s worth a lot to those who value it, and not much to anyone else.

art and money

To make money by one’s art should be nothing more than a delightful and unexpected convergence. Like running into an old friend someplace you never could have imagined.

poets and panhandlers

The dilemma of paying poets for their poems is it's like giving money to panhandlers: you want to help but you don’t want to encourage them.

small check

Even during the times when he was making hundreds of thousands per year, it pleased him to get $200 for doing a reading or $50 for a published poem.

bohemians at the gate

Bohemination: When the neighborhood becomes filled with artists and poets, and the panhandlers are driven out for lack of prospects with money in their pockets.

commercially viable poet

Strange pairing: A poet with an agent.

poorer for it

Many who enter the trade come to think that poetry should be spelled “poorertry”

unremunerated

“Penny for your thoughts,” I said to the pensive poet. “Sad,” he replied, “but that’s more than I made last year from my published work.”

playing long odds

He was prone to playing the long odds, so he quit his job, borrowed $50K and bet on getting an MFA in Creative Writing.

currency trade

If poetry is a kind of money it’s as mysterious in value as bitcoin.

money pit

Are manuscript contest entry fees and other submission fees draining the disposable income that poets have for buying poetry books?

hush money

Poets who never made much money until they were offered money not to write so much.

income gap

My plan was to make a living by writing poetry. But I had a back-up plan of buying a lottery ticket each week.

art's remuneration

One of those artists who thought the world owed him a living without proof of his worth.

just jossing

Wallace Stevens once quipped (in his “Adagia”), “Poetry is a kind of money.” Which always makes me wonder, What kind of currency?: Confederate?, counterfeit?, or joss money? Yes, joss, I think I can smell it burning to favor the dead.

paid poet

He was a poet who got paid.

follows the money

After his death, the poet’s reputation slipped in proportion to the fewer pages in major anthologies carrying his work, which in turn was a result of the hefty fees his rights holders asked for permission to reprint his poems.

money of fools

For words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon with them; but they are the money of fools.

—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan