In March 2018, the Jerwood Foundation hosted an event at London's Free Word Centre asking, ‘Are Poets the New Creative Entrepreneurs?’ Anthony Anaxagorou, one of four poets on the panel, had tweeted: ‘This will be really helpful for anyone interested in making a living as a poet, or thinking about poetry in more entrepreneurial ways.’ Waiting for the roundtable to start, two young writers in the row behind me were discussing Jack Canfield's business handbook, The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. I thought of the time my salesman father took me, aged 14 or so, to a conference room in a hotel, where someone explained how much money we could make peddling magazine subscriptions through their fail- proof system. I thought of people dismissing creative writing as a pyramid scheme, predicated on endless growth to sustain book sales and teacher- writers’ salaries. I thought of Randall Jarrell, complaining to Elizabeth Bishop in 1956: ‘Who’d have thought the era of the poet in the grey flannel suit was coming?’

Anxieties around professionalisation are nothing new to poetry, but the Jerwood event felt different. Its title and mere existence suggested something had shifted in the way we approach the business of poetry – which is to say, the stuff necessary to writing that isn't writing itself. Watching the speakers enter, pose for official photos and perch with varying degrees of discomfort while microphones were clipped to lapels (no grey flannel in sight), it was hard to imagine the question about creative entrepreneurship being formulated in quite that way a few years ago. It's not that everyone now agrees on the answer – another panellist, Inua Ellams, was quick to say he ‘resents’ such labels – but it was clear that the terms of debate were changing. The eager, standing- room- only crowd for a frank discussion of something like ‘professionaldevelopment’ clearly marked a growing need for practical career advice. This chapter attempts to balance those changing professional needs with the specific pressures around entrepreneurialism discussed in the previous one.