Responding to Waldrop - Morgan

We live in an age where poetry is becoming less and less a part of most peoples lives. It is being taught in school less, and fewer people read poetry. It is no longer possible for even the most successful poets to live only off of his or her book sales. Despite the little material rewards for being a poet they continue to write. Just as Waldrop suggests in her writing, the function of poetry is to waste excess energy; it is this idea that explains the determination of poetry and poets in this time to continue to write.

Georges Bataille describes that a person receives more energy than they need to maintain life. Therefore, there is an abundance of energy that needs to be used gloriously, or wasted. There are several ways that energy can be used positively: all forms or art or other ways of expressing feelings and emotions, time spent bettering your own life or the life of another, or time spent simply doing something that you really love to do. So excess energy should be used for improvement or growth. Time spent idle or time simply spent wasting time is a waste of excess energy. This energy is wasted because it is not being spent gaining anything: such as a skill, profit, or happiness. This energy we are given as humans is either wasted and we can never get it back or spent gloriously; one way that it is used wonderfully is through the expression of emotion in poetry.

It is Bataille’s “notion of waste and excess (energy) that explains the persistence of poets and poetry in the face of meager rewards.” Writing a poem is very difficult to do; writing takes a lot of time, focus, thinking, and energy; therefore, the energy that is used in writing a poem outweighs any monetary gain or any other gain like reputation. It is the fact that poetry is one of the glorious ways to spend and use ones energy that makes poetry worthwhile to write. This is due to the fact that poetry is not very profitable especially in the United States. No poetry writers can make a profit by only writing; also there are very few full time novelists that can make a living by writing. Many writers and almost all poets have other jobs to supplement their writing career. This difficulty to make a living is not due to a decreasing skill of the poet it is due to a decreasing demand from consumers. “The small presses and their distributors have no hope of even breaking even and must rely on grants or patronage” to keep their businesses running. Also bookstores and booksellers do not make a huge profit of selling small books of poetry. The lack of profit for poetry runs all the way through the circular flow of the economy, from the firm to the distributor to the consumer.

There is little money or fame in poetry and the small press world these days. It is Bataille’s general economy that describes that poetry’s function is to waste excess energy, which explains the persistence of poets despite little economic gains. The function of poetry is not to become rich or famous, it is to waste time gloriously. Poets use their excess energy gloriously instead of wasting their energy away.