Re: <nettime> aaaaarg lawsuit digest #ANON

[Carsten Agger <agger@modspil.dk>]

Den 14-01-2016 kl. 19:58 skrev morlockelloi@yahoo.com:

> So you will keep and feed your own poet in your basement?
>
> Or is he going to be paid by the enlightened government?
>
> Or we'll just have to do with:
>
> - the already existing poetry?
> - bad poetry by Uber drivers written in their spare time?
> - free propaganda poetry funded by various parties?
>
> Pick one.

I don't know of any modern poet who is actually able to make a living 
from the sale of books in copyright. Poetry is the perennial example of 
an art which people are not in for the money.

And if we have a look of the really big poets, we'll find that normally, 
poetry was not the way they made their living, and if it was, the 
important factor was readings (like Dylan Thomas) rather than book sales.

Shelley bungled his way through a lot of debts, had practically no 
readers while he was alive and definitely didn't make a lot of money 
from his poetry.

Byron did make some money from book sales, but they didn't precisely 
finance his life style.

Yeats made money as a playwright rather than as a poet (if you can 
separate these things).

And given that, the American poet Judson Jerome seriously questioned 
whether restricting the circulation of one's poetry is really in the 
best interest of any poet.

As he said:

"Like patents, copyrights are intended to enable creators to profit from 
their work, and if what you write is likely to earn big profits, that 
may well concern you.  Certainly it concerns commercial publishers:  as 
I will explain later, copyrights are the mainstay of their business.  
But since a poet is likely to derive little income from his work at 
best, and none at all unless there is some public demand for his work, 
and since copyright limits circulation, I don't see why a poet should 
want it.  I just pulled out of the wastebasket one of the dozens of 
privately printed first collections of poetry I receive each year.  It 
bears this imposing notice:

Copyright 1976 by ____________________

All rights reserved.  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced 
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, 
including recording, photocopying, offset, or by any information storage 
and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author, 
except by reviewers who may quote brief passages to be printed in a 
magazine or newspaper.

The poor lady may have paid some lucky attorney to help her draw up that 
statement, but you may copy it for your own book if you please.  It even 
keeps people from reading her poems over the telephone.  I wonder what 
she hopes to protect herself from.  In my view she would have done 
better to say, "I beg you to reproduce or transmit in any form or by any 
means ...".  That way someone might hear of her or benefit from or enjoy 
what she has written.  Someone might like her work and hire her to write 
something for money.  Some commercial publisher might track her down and 
ask to bring out her next collection – if free circulation of this book 
created a demand.  As it is, she could hardly have tied up her 
manuscript more securely by locking it in her trunk."

http://www.poemtree.com/Jerome/Publishing-Chapter04.htm

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