Thanks once again to Jilly Dybka‘s Poetry Hut Blog for the link to this brief meditation by Writer’s Market and Poet’s Market editor Robert Lee Brewer on the perennial question, “How much money does a poet make?” Brewer correctly answers “peanuts,” though it’s likely to be less: seeds and stems at best. “Bottom line: There’s no money in poetry,” he writes. Which reminds me that poet Wallace Stevens, a “claims man” and ultimately VP of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., famously said that “money is a kind of poetry.” Something perhaps only a poet with money could claim (Graham Foust‘s erudite exploration of the subject notwithstanding). Poetry, it seems to me, is money-like only in the sense that every poem is a charge on the poet’s cultural debit card—a charge the poet can never pay back. Readers have to pay it back, don’t they? But almost never in the poet’s lifetime. Every poet dies in debt, even the rich ones with “spiritual hunger.” Maybe Bill Knott is secretly taking this into account, as it were, in his recent post, wherein he makes one of the most profound statements I’ve ever read about poetry: “Form is never more than an extension of breakfast.” So put another omelette on the debit card for me—something chock full of bacon and cheese, with lots of jalapeños and a dollop of sour cream: a delicious new poem by Philip Levine, let’s say….