The link still works, Sean. I've been looking at this thread and feeling both a lot to say and that I don't know what to say. A kind of drowning man's incoherence comes to mind. The essay seems well-intentioned but any study that has such a drift is critically weakened by an absence of Da Economics. Of course we are perpetually told there is no money in poetry, and of course again that is a lie. Obviously the rewards aren't on the scale of other arts, and only a very few become very wealthy out of it, but it is certainly possible to make a reasonable middle class income out of it with a great deal less stress you would get from other, comparable, 'middle-management' paths. This is true not only of the performance and mainstream but now that the 'avant-garde' is being absorbed by the universities it applies to that ultra-Cinderella of the arts too. The role of the 'amateur' in this is quite simple: that of food. The economic basis of professional poetry is the management and exploitation of amateurs, of the 'would-be's', usually relatively well-heeled amateurs unless there are grants involved, as in the case of the mentally ill or prisoners. The poetry scene is as ugly as our society, and every bit as horrible as the eighteenth century version pictured in Johnson's Lives of the Poets. It's not there aren't 'nice' people out there in it, like other institutions based lies, such as the churches, it has its saints, or even just fairly kind people, but overall it's enough to start King Lear shouting again.
Cheers!