Well, yeah. Getting poetry published in the first place is an uphill battle, even compared to prose publishing. It’s been a long time since poetry was core to pop culture, despite the occasional surges. Which means there’s no money in it unless you somehow manage to have the right connections and a lot of luck.

That, in turn, disincentivizes writers from after actively working on poetry. It becomes a much more casual thing, which means that the craft of it rarely gets honed the way other branches of writing do.

There’s less written, in part because there’s less read, which leads to lower quality work, which decreases interest, which decreases cash flow, which means less gets written. It’s a spiral.

Poetry as a hobby is viable. Poetry as anything to try and get others to read is much less so.

Hell, i don’t think I’ve written a serious poem in a decade. Some occasional lines will pop in my head, I jot them down, but they never connect or spark a continuance. I do the occasional bit of drivel, or a rhymed joke. Even a jokey song once, but even if I was cranking them out like I did as a teenager, I wouldn’t even bother posting them on lemmy, much less a more poetry-centric place