I'm always interested in seeing a new assessment of the current condition of poetry. The diagnosis can be very different depending on the perspective of the author, from a eulogy to a thriving Slam scene to a lament that Milton shouldst be living at this hour.
There's a new one from Clare Pollard here, http://clarepollard.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/the-health-of-poetry/ which is in depth, with detailed analysis and from the front line.
I hope I do no injustice to it in summarizing its main points as the end of Salt publishing volumes by individuals while they concentrate on anthologies and an argument in favour of awards and subsidies not only for emerging poets but established poets, too, because a hole is created for those who emerge but find it hard to go further.
I doubt if there has been a time before when there were quite so many poets aspiring to professional or semi-professional status but I read somewhere a few years ago that if a poetry title sells 500 copies then it has done very well. There wouldn't seem to be a living wage to be earned by publishing such books which would usually be the work of a few years and even getting paid for doing readings is unlikely to raise such a poet, living by poetry alone, to the minimum wage.
A few years ago I asked on a website forum how many poetry books people owned and most had several hundred but there weren't very many of them. Not as many who would be able to say they owned a few hundred pop music CD's. The health of poetry might not be best measured in economic terms. It has been noted before that the growth of the creative writing industry has created a market in which too many find themselves qualified for top honours and there are not enough consumers to buy all of their books.
Poetry doesn't need to be a full-time job in the way that novelist or musician does. It was, through history, more often an amateur occupation undertaken by individuals who had other means of getting by. I'm sure patronage and sponsorship were welcome but hardly essential and one wonders that if a great poem needed writing if its author decided against writing it through the unlikeliness of being paid enough for it. Maybe there were masterpieces lost to economic necessity but I suspect now that more poets are producing more poems only to be disappointed that there is less reward for them than they thought. A number of writing careers among contemporary poets have begun with a couple of slim volumes but they have since written novels or work for the theatre and the greater pecuniary advantage of such a stategy encouraged them to do more.
Dr. Johnson, of course, offered the opinion that 'no man but a blockhead ever wrote, if not for money' but, much admired though he is, Johnson was a staunch Tory and not afraid to say so and, then as now, a Tory's primary concern is always going to be hard cash.
I'd like to suggest that the state of poetry, which is probably healthy enough at present without being a Golden Age, is better judged on whether the poetry being written is any good or not rather than how it is being published and how many people are buying it. 70's disco music was a fine, and much underestimated, genre but by far its biggest selling records were those of the Bee Gees, which would be a good place to rest my case but
Poetry is not going to stop being written because we are in terminal economic decline in these islands. There is no prospect of an age of prosperity in which no other use can be found for spare money than to give it to poets. It is remarkable how much of an industry there is in poetry now and I'm not convinced all of that is a good thing.
No, Salt isn't the first poetry list to be disbanded. Oxford Poets went several years ago and poetry magazine titles come and go in a regular cycle of new inspiration and diminishing resources.
I hope that the printed word isn't disappearing and don't believe for one minute that it is.
Not all of that is a bad thing.