The Price of Poetry

I started 3 new poems this week, and I feel completely wiped out by them. I find it so strange that writing a silly poem or two takes so much out of me. I can run ten miles with greater ease and less physical pain than composing half a poem. That said, I still think the hardest job is farming. So many of my writer friends talk of my childhood on a farm as somehow merely bucolic. They seem to picture the act of farming as watching the alfalfa grow. What I remember was the feeling that the work would never be done. And unlike a poem, you can't just abandon the farm . . . And there was not much profit involved.

Maybe as a result, I tend to look up the news about the American dairy farmer. The independent small farmer, not the CAFOs. The news is never good. (It might be worse than trying to make a living as a poet.) The more we rely on CAFOs of course, the greater the environmental damage. I can't imagine why anyone would want to operate a factory farm. Ah well. Here's the latest:

"According to the USDA, the average cost of production for milk is $24.08 per hundredweight (cwt or 100 pounds), while the price dairy farmers were paid for their milk in April sunk to $10.78 cwt.

This means that dairy farmers are earning less than half of what it costs to produce their milk. Imagine having your salary cut in half and still trying to cover the same monthly bills. Even worse, feed and fuel prices are starting to go up in the past few months. For farmers, most of whom work too long of hours and are paid too little money, this is the perfect formula for a final liquidation of one of the last remaining independent segments of ag production. For years, small and medium-sized farms have relied on their dairy cows to stay relatively free from domination by factory farms and corporate agribusiness. But no longer. " (from Grist)

Of course, there aren't any reports on the average production costs for poets and writers. How much per weight in pages. And whether it costs more to produce than to write. Evidently if we could eat or drink poetry, it probably wouldn't help much--unless we could churn them out . . . and not worry about the quality. Who would know the difference? we might reason. One poem is as good as another. The more, the faster, the better. Sometimes when I have a glass of milk these days, I have to remind myself that this is milk I'm drinking. Not some cold white drink with a flavor of liquid white noise. No, this milk from a carton is nothing like the milk I drank as a child, the fresh milk with a taste of sunlight and grass and TLC.