A long time ago I had a conversation with someone who was considering to be a man-of-letters. The person was meeting the difficult subject heads on.
‘It would be nice to write poetry‘, he said, ‘and I do like writing poetry. But it doesn’t sell. I won’t be able to earn money with it. And I need to earn money. That’s why I’ll be writing prose‘.
Without being ironic, I think this was a very sensible line of argument. I heard it in 2001, if not 2000 – a long time ago. Today, in 2009 I was checking my emails, one of which was from a poet. As becomes Gmail, I was served “relevant ads”, including the one in the screen grab, from Blogit.com:
So, without much ado, just as you can earn zillions by instant blogging, so you can earn money the moment you start writing poetry. And if it does sound like I’m uttering things then I’m simply using the extreme example. As we know, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) is increasingly becoming very rare.
