Outside the cities, poets are like Chinese restaurants, spaced to avoid oversaturating an area. The strategy, building collective success on individual loneliness, has worked for most of the genre’s recent history.

In their outposts, the poets find ways to adapt. When alone in cafés, they get coffee to go because lingering magnifies their sense of exile. When they realize that, no longer taking the subway or wiping soot off kitchen appliances, they can easily keep a white shirt white, they stop wearing all black. The literary scene being tiny, they convert their readings to lectures. If single, they date journalists, who can construct a concise sentence, or martial-arts instructors, who have a sense of form.

Although the poets continue to refer to where they came from as “home,” as the years pass and more family members disperse, they begin to despair of having anywhere to return to. But it isn’t all bad. Once they’ve secured a niche in the local economy, most poets can afford a house and, if they have children, send them to the good public schools. Social acceptance is likely because in 1968 Richard Scarry included a poet in an attic in What Do People Do All Day?, legitimizing the occupation and countering the notion of poets as tragic urbanites who die young.

When tempted to complain, the poets remind themselves of others who are worse off: those who have multiple roommates at midlife, those whose devotion to the purity of their art makes them unmarketable, and those whose failure to acculturate has left them socially stranded, speaking a language the neighbors find opaque and intimidating.

Poets have long attracted readers by putting poems in mailboxes, pinning them to bulletin boards, and leaving stacks of them in entryways. At times, the abundance of paper in public spaces is denounced as a public nuisance, and any poet seen approaching the vestibule of an office or apartment building is shooed away before a stanza hits a surface. Occasionally, a poet who lives in one of these buildings, coming home from work, is mistaken for a litterer. Still, the distributors persist, even at risk of being fined, because usually, somebody somewhere picks up a poem and takes an interest.

Each small victory counts. For instance, sometimes the bureaucrat who collects parking and littering fines admits to liking haiku and dismisses the penalty. While this isn’t what any poet first envisioned as “making it” as an artist, such an episode makes for a decent day in a long string of days that could have gone differently, days that could have added up to silence instead of obscurity.