Hi Ansel,

The traditional way to make money from poetry is to do something else. You submit to little literary journals, maybe try get something published in the New Yorker or Paris Review, enter contests, do some readings, collect your poems together and get them published by a small press, attend an MFA course and then teach at a community college or university.

I have more thoughts on this essay, but I think I want to let them percolate a bit before I express them. I do think Medium lends itself well to poetry, but you do have to do the work of building an readership/audience and getting your poetry out there. (Nothing is stopping you from leveraging Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, etc., to do that.) One thing I think poets can take heart about is poetry is evergreen, and perhaps unlike other categories of content when people like one poem, they will often read several others.