It's not a subject that poets discuss over dinner, or at literary parties. If someone does raise the issue, we murmur a few perfunctory words, followed by "pass the hummus, please."

Yet the more we ignore the elephant in the corner, the more damage it does, breaking one chair after another and then taking aim at the walls.

The elephant is the poetic economy, of course. The sagging poetic economy, since book sales are abysmal and more people write poetry than read it.

But no one knows how to fix the problem, so we cover our eyes and whisper, “Shhh, he’ll go away if he can't see us.“

Unfortunately, that approach didn't work when we were 2-year-olds, and the elephant isn't falling for it, either.

John Barr, a successful investment banker, prefers to look the pachyderm right in the eye. And as president of the Poetry Foundation, he's trying to tame the unruly creature by implementing several initiatives intended to jumpstart the poetic economy at both the macro (large scale) and micro (individual) levels.

One major factor, as he explains in “Six or Seven Ways to a Better Poetry,” an unpublished manifesto, is that writers ignore – or forget – their job description. “The poet’s job, basically, is to celebrate life. Poetry’s limitations in the past century come not from failures of craft but from afflictions of spirit,” Barr writes. “A Bosnian survivor reading our American literature of despair, with its spiritual quality of dispossession, might compare our own lives to his own and ask, ‘So, what’s the problem?’ "

The problem, it seems, is a steady diet of self-imposed darkness with no hint of respite or redemption. Who wants to swallow that, especially when each thin book costs $15 or $20?

Another part of the equation, argues Barr, is that poets tend to live narrow lives, especially those in academia. They confine themselves to the ivy walls, rather than following the example of Ernest Hemingway, who sought out new experiences – African safaris, driving an ambulance during the Spanish civil war – in order to feed his writing. “When did you last meet a contemporary poet who takes that approach, seeking out fresh experience or new knowledge specifically for the benefit of his or her poetry?” Barr writes. “If you would write better, live differently,” he urges.

Barr isn’t the first to make such observations, nor is he trodding virgin ground when he points out the dangers of “the MFA poem,” which is written in free verse, in the present tense, and is “single-mindedly personal.”

He is, however, connecting the dots between individual "producers" and the market as a whole. “Poetry needs to find its audience again, and address it." To do this, poets must bear in mind the impact of "what they write on how their readers live.”

That's a polite way of saying there's a cost and a consequence for every action, and poets have reaped what they've sown – unwittingly, perhaps – in vivid, disappointing ways. Even if Barr can improve the poetic economy, rebuilding its infrastructure and improving delivery methods, he can't make people buy a product they don't want.

That's the real elephant here. Shh, don't let it hear you.