On Poetry and Money

I've always known English language poetry isn't a high-paying market at this point; The English-speaking world has very few professional poets but I've long believed and still believe that this is bound to change. If an art is considered importand and valuable by the mainstream of a society, then mastery of it is worth money. If it isn't, it isn't.
Having some money from other sources, I've never worried too much about the short-term financial pay-off. My "strategy" has been to post on various on-line communities and just build readership, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble links to my "self-published" books(Those who dismiss self-publishing should really consider the great number of now famous books that were self-published from Walden to Nietzche's famous "Thus Spake Zorathustra.) In some ways this has worked; I've had over a million E-reads and a lot of praise. But it doesn't translate into massive book sales. I've also won a few paying essay contests, have been a paid journalist, have been published on e-zines, etc.
Now, I have this 2006 Poet's Market book from the Writer's Market corporation; It's been sitting around for a while. So lately, I've been leafing through it looking for paying markets. But the book's a lie: it's titled "Poet's Market," but I don't see any market. All the publications are lumped in one category, and looking through them: most just don't pay, and it's nearly impossible to find anyone who pays more than $20 a poem.
So I ask myself: what on earth is going on in the poetry world to cause this great dirth of paying markets? After considering the question, I've come to some theories. First of all, I think that a considerable but limited number paying markets are out there. But the random nature of the internet(and the great number of fraudulent web-sites) makes them difficult to find that way. On that line of thought: I'd be grateful to hear about any markets you know of that pay at the very least $50 a poem, accept simultaneous submissions, and don't charge a "reading fee." I've never payed such a fee, never intend to, and don't think any poet should have to.
Secondly, there are a lot of talented poets out there who are more interested in their art, ideas, and being published than they are about money. They're either independently wealthy or have good day jobs. Through no fault of their own, they toughen the market for the poet who wants a pay-check. There is, however, "offense and much of it" with markets who can afford to offer payment but don't because of this factor. Due to them, many of our time's most talented writers just don't write poetry; Like all working-class people, they're looking to get ahead in the world and hear: "There's no money in poetry." So they write screen-plays or mystery novels.
But really, I think the heart of the problem is that the modern English-speaking world undervalues poetry... as it does most real arts but to a more extreme extent. This is partly because many famous people in the poetry world over the last century took it way in the wrong directions(there have been a number of failed directions.) I'm not going to expound on this issue but I will offer the example of Ezra Pound, a fellow who's been heavily anthologized aned taught in universities over the last century or so. Okay, so Mr. Pound was an avid anti-semite and gave fervent radio broadcasts on the subject under Mussolini's Italian government. After the war, he was found to be too mentally ill to be criminally responsible: this seems to me a reasonable finding. And I'm not saying he had no talent as a poet.
I wouldn't know: a rabid anti-semite who never publicly repented can't be that fascinating, and his poetry takes intense close reading to understand. No, this last point wouldn't be of much importance except for the first. Yet this fellow looms large in the great poetry anthologies, and when a university student takes a poetry class: we present this unethical lunatic as a brilliant representative of the art of poetry, and we even make them study a poem "Usura" which blames all problems of the modern world on Jewry(and isn't even linguistically brilliant.)
Also, the text-books present him along-side other writers of questionable stature: Walt Whitman, the puritan Milton, Wallace Stevens, etc. And then the professor goes on and on about Shakespeare and Robert Frost(who were true geniuses,) but what about edgier figures like Claude McKay or Christopher Marlowe? The latter, an early champion of atheism and a figure of great intellectual and artistic importance, is usually represented by one profoundly mediocre and repentant work: "Faustus." And the former, despite being a key-player in the Harlem renaissance, is NOWHERE to be found.
To conclude, I really have no great conclusion. There's no crisis: English poetry is far from dead. Actually, I see it as a great and sacred art emerging from a partly self-induced dark age: especially in the U.S.A.
But I, a working-class writer with a degree in English and Literature and dreams and ambitions, may write a screen-play... or a mystery novel.