I find responding to the adjoining article more fruitful than doing so to the poems themselves, which were, to me, over-familiar and unmemorable. That can be a matter of taste and editorial preference.

A poet acquaintance of mine said a couple years ago that everyone is tired of the image of the starving artist, and I think he's right. Or I think they should be, at least. While the introduction is accurate in saying poetry itself isn't often rewarded with considerable cash, the fact that such statements are present in virtually every piece of this sort is trite and minimizing. While the poems aren't reaping financial rewards, the people who write them have skills and vision that leave them more than capable of supporting themselves in other ways. I'm belaboring this a little to express my point, but the frequent inclusion of phrases of that sort begins, after a while, to make artists and writers sound as though they're all broke outsiders. It's romanticizing, in a way.

That's not at all to say that I don't appreciate grants and fellowships that reward writers' devotion to their craft. They are wonderful, and intended to put the writers in a position to produce more work by easing other financial burdens and obligations, and their success in accomplishing that is evident. I think this is really the reason mention is made of monetary hardship all the time, but framed differently.

As for the article's mention that it's controversial for all five winners of a writing award to be men, I want to respond by providing a statistical representation of the gender disparity in publishing of late. (This is a way, I think, to begin explaining why this is a controversial thing at all.) Here is a study performed by VIDA that gives numbers behind the male-female publishing ratio in popular writing venues.