because there's no money in poetry.

Roy Lichtenstein, Masterpiece (1962)

From Jack Collom's Second Nature (2012): excerpt from an interview between Mr. Collom (JC) and Reed Bye (RB):

JC: [B]eing in NYC the last five years where the critical intelligence is so voracious, it's very hard to maintain faith and there's a lot of cynicism in the air about everything being done, people categorize——well, in New York with its excessive input, that categorization problem, I mean so much is coming in at you from all sides that people develop this habit of rejecting and classifying and uh——it is very hard to be open when you have that voice around you that's like a school of piranha ready to gobble up your words. You just feel it even if people don't say things like that. 

RB: And the pressure to have your own critical reference and express it with great confidence is much more pronounced there too. You get some overconfident——uh——well it's the sort of trend phenomenon that sweeps over New York or anywhere, any cultural center where trying to constantly keep on top of what has set the trend, or be aware of the new trend, that never stops. 

JC: Yeah——the novelty thing gets a little heavy there. Whatever has not been cloaked with aesthetic feeling before is searched out and eventually after you've gone through a whole bunch of sensibilities, there's a certain aesthetic delight popped out of them because nobody's ever looked at them that way before. There's certainly a lot to that, you know, finding aesthetic delight in anything in the world, but the chase for untried fields in that way just runs around and around, ah, it becomes too conceptual for one thing, people don't have time to develop a competency in a style, they're just after the weird idea that nobody ever thought of, rather than practicing and deepening themselves in some sensibility, filling out a world of nuances... 

RB: In the poetry world, that doesn't seem quite as true. 

JC: No, partly because there's no money in poetry. 

[end of interview]