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Poet Roundtable
7.
AOTW: It is well known that poetry does not "sell" as well as other forms of literature. What have you done to promote your work?
Carol Muske-Dukes: I'm a terrible "promoter" and I don't believe that poets should over-hustle their wares. Thank god poetry doesn't command the material rewards like, say, screenplays can. But I recommend every reader to Martin Amis' hilarious story "Career Move" (in his collection Heavy Water) --- it imagines a world in which poetry takes the place of film in terms of money and fame --- he "reverses" the two worlds and it is outrageously funny.
Daniel Mark Epstein: I have written the best poems I know how to write, always with consideration of the potential reader. I consider clarity to be an essential property of poetry. When I was a young man I read my poetry aloud whenever I was invited.
Mark Ford: Well, not much, which may be one of the reasons why I am unknown, certainly in "my own countree!" I've given very few readings in Britain, and am not on the "circuit" as they call it. A number of poets here make a living from readings and appearances and seem perpetually on tour from one festival to another. I have a job, however, and don't think of my poetry as a money-making career. I also don't have a website, as I understand other poets do, and which I guess they tend each morning as one might tend a garden, planting a new poem like a lobelia, then watering it by offering a link to an explanation of its composition. There is still a strong tradition of the amateur-dilettante in English poetry, and I seem somewhat unconsciously to have gone along with the notion that self-promotion is distasteful and vulgar. No longer however! as I hope my full and revealing and self-promoting answers to these questions is proving: being published by Harcourt Brace in America is, as we speak, enabling me to cast off this diffidence, like Clark Kent changing from his drab office clothes to his superman outfit in his phone-booth. Hence my 7 date tour, which I arranged myself, with a little help from American friends and supporters, such as John Ashbery (I will be reading with him at the Russian Samovar and at his university, Bard) and Helen Vendler, who set up a date at Harvard. Just dropping these names so casually makes me realize I am a natural at this.
Robin Robertson: I give readings. Indeed, I will be reading in NYC on 22 and 24 April and in Chicago on 25 April.
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