It will surprise everyone though if you make as much as Gates has and do it with poetry. You can learn something about marketing poetry, but you may have to choose how you ration your time, if money is a top priority. Is poetry an art form to you or a means of communicating with your classmates and other poets. They barely tolerate their patrons, unless they are lucky enough to find one who encourages them to do what they were planning to do anyway. Communicating with your classmates is exactly the same thing.
People love to toss ideas and artistic efforts around among peers of similar interests.
Painters can hardly wait to show another artist their latest painting. Poets are just as eager to show their work to a peer. Everybody but Edgar Allen Poe will consider you too morbid if you lean a little to the somber. You will have your work cut out for you to get lighter than Ogden Nash or Edward Lear. If you are anywhere else in the spectrum you will alternately be accused of being too serious and too trivial.