Do more people write poetry than read it?

Probably not...

There is an idea that more people write poetry than read it. Often, this argument is made by people who edit poetry magazines. Most recently, Sam Leith has made this argument, in response to this Note worrying that the Venn diagram of people who read and who write poetry is a circle.

To a certain extent, this is just the sort of exaggeration one expects on the internet. But it is important to note that the idea is false. According to NEA data, something like 9-12% of American adults read poetry. That is some thirty or forty million people. In the UK last year, over a million books of poetry were sold.

Now, maybe these numbers have changed from earlier times, but do we think they are very much higher than in the past? There is simply no way that these millions of people are sending poems to magazines. That is not what the editors’ anecdotes suggest. They are seeing the multiple submissions, the prolific minority, the enthusiastic “Sunday poets”, but they are not seeing the silent readers, who don’t talk much about their reading, let alone write about it, who don’t go to readings or workshops.

Theirs is an understandable point of view. Beleaguered editors are inundated with submissions from people who do not subscribe to the magazine, but all the people reading Poetry Foundation or Poetry Archive, pulling down an old favourite from the shelf, discovering a new poem as they scroll—they don’t need or want poetry magazines. (Maybe they should, though: Victoria Moul reviews some options if you are interested…)

A lot of poetry magazines, we must be honest, are full of poems that not all poetry readers want to read, either because they will read them in books and anthologies (or online) later on, or because there is never going to be much of an audience for the work. These magazines are part of a winnowing process, in which many readers will not, understandably, wish to take part.

It is reasonable to think that we must have flourishing poetry magazines of the old-fashioned sort, but lots of poets publish online—some of them here on Substack!—and they do just fine.

There are still plenty more readers than writers of poetry, they just may not be reading what the editors wish them to read.