(Colleen Robertson Abel, Millicent Accardi, Marty McConnell, Eileen Myles, Rita Mae Reese) Have you seen your poems on blogs or pillows sold on Etsy but weren't even consulted or paid for their use? Would you like to receive payment for your poetry? Do you have a special project that needs funding? This panel will identify avenues of support for poets who make potential readers more aware of and invested in poetry as a living art form. We will explore the concept of the gift economy, aggregated sites for donations, crowdsourcing, rent parties, and more.

Published Date: November 11, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Colleen Robertson, Abel Millicent Ardi, Marty McConnell, Eileen Miles, and Rita May Reese, you will now hear Rita May Reese provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:33):

Hello everyone and thanks for coming. This is from Rent Parties to Kickstarter, democratizing the patronage of poetry. I regret to say that the panelist who was supposed to talk about rent parties could not be with us. In fact, couldn't even throw her own rent party because the university where she teaches told her that that's not something that tenure track professors do. Wow. So you're in luck though, because I'm going to tell you about what a rent party is. They were really big in Harlem in the depression era and then post-war when rents were high and salaries were really low and Langston Hughes had a really great collection of advertisements for them. So if you search like Langston Hughes rent party, you'll get to see some of these really cool little cards that people made up and they always had really cool rhymes at the top of them and that's why he liked them. So what it was, people would provide music and booze and charge like 50 cents of the door so they could make rent. Anyone here ever throw a rent? I've been to one. You've been to one? I've been to one, but I never thrown one. Alright, so questions for rent parties. Go to Marty at the end, or now you have an assignment. Someone here has to throw a rent party and then report back to us. Or better yet, you could just invite us.

Speaker 2 (01:53):

So our panelists that we have today are going to talk about crowdfunding lessons from Spot Us, Frida Kahlo, Etsy and online workshops, GoFundMe grants and reading series, and the role of economic histories of cities, the Rise of Writing programs and L G B T invisibility, the role that those all play in poetic poverty. We'll be hearing from Colleen Robinson, Abel, Marty McConnell, Millicent Boi, and Eileen Miles in that order. So please hold your questions for the panelists until the end. I want to talk to you today about thinking outside of the book as an alternative to support for poetry, and I want to talk to you about an alternative to PayPal called dala, which is D W O L L A. Has anyone here heard of that? It's an online transfer system that I think could change the way we value poetry.

Speaker 2 (02:56):

So after my first book was published, I started thinking a lot about as a delivery system for poetry and also as a delivery system for financial support for poets. I'd spent thousands of dollars submitting to contests and then a lot of my own money traveling for readings. And I slowly gave into the realization that I'd never earn a dime of royalties on the book. Luckily, I'd read the Gift by Louis Hyde around the same time. That book talks about the importance of the gift economy of creating community through giving and receiving gifts. I realized then that my book had been a gift from Eloise Klein Healy and the folks of Redhead Press. So in the Gift Hyde talks about how important it is to keep gifts moving. So I began thinking about my book that way rather than as this failed commodity object and that at least reduced my anxiety.

Speaker 2 (03:56):

And I also noticed it really seems to be mostly students and poets who buy poetry and a lot of them are fairly broke fairly often, and 18 or 20 bucks is a lot to spend on a book you might never actually read or only read part of and then not like. And that got me to thinking about how we don't know we love a poem right after reading it or hearing it for the first time. Usually I think it's when a poem comes back to us when a few lines spring to mind of their own accord or when life has sucker punched us again and we go to that poem to keep us company in our pain, that's when we love a poem or there's a poem we read out loud to friends because it's so damn funny. Its lines become a catchphrase with our friends. These are the poems we should be paying more for. These poems are worth a lot and no one is going to go out and buy the book again. And even if they did, the poet would only get maybe a buck 80 at most out of the deal.

Speaker 2 (04:55):

We have the technology now to simply send money for what we value and it's really very easy. The company called Dawa that I mentioned earlier, lets you transfer money to anyone with just their email address or phone number. Any transfers of $10 or less has no transaction fee. And above that the transaction fee is a whopping 25 cents. So if you have any selling apparatus on a website or anything, I would strongly encourage you to shed PayPal and go with Dwella. I am not trying to say that we don't need books or journals, though perhaps as a friend of mine recently suggested, we need slightly fewer of them. I think we can't keep hoping that books are going to perform this function that they're not capable of performing except in very rare instances.

Speaker 2 (05:49):

I also think it's great that poets can make money by making truffles. There's some really good truffles made by two poets truffles if you're looking and by doing Indiegogo campaigns and writing haiku at corporate functions, which apparently you can make more than $200 an hour at. But look, you already do a lot. I don't think you need to do more. I think you deserve to get paid for what you already do. Poetry has never been a great fit for capitalism, and that's one of the things I love about it. It helps create among other things, community and relationship, which we need even more than money. So I think by acknowledging the gift nature of poetry and using the technology that's already here, we can create a wider culture of support in a wider community for poetry. Like Arlo Guthrie said in Alice's restaurant, if one person does it, they'll think he's nuts. But if a bunch of people do it, they'll think it's a movement. So thank you.

Speaker 3 (07:02):

So I'm just going to start with a little story, even though I think I'm preaching to the choir here with everybody in this room, but when I was in my late twenties, I lived here in Minneapolis and I applied for my first and only grant. This was through the Minnesota State Arts Board, and I had no idea what I was doing, but I dutifully filled out my project proposal and my statement about why I needed the grant and what I would use it for. And I was honest about my financial situation. My husband was a graduate student at the time. I was working a couple different part-time jobs and it was a really rough time. Plasma selling was involved and the board deliberations were open to the public so you could go over to the open book building to hear the panel talk about your grant application.

Speaker 3 (07:52):

And I thought this was a golden opportunity to hear what these kind of deliberations were like. So I sat there for many, many hours until they got to my application. And really the only thing I remember about their conversation was that at 1.1 of the panelists threw his hands up in the air when they were talking about my statement of need and said it's like, okay, okay, we get it. You've suffered. So needless to say I was rejected. Several years later, I actually went to a panel at a W P about how to fill out these kinds of grant applications and I learned something that had already become obvious to me, which is don't talk about how much you need the money, even though you're supposed to talk about the money, you're not supposed to talk about how much you need it. And I've never really understood that very well.

Speaker 3 (08:40):

I am distressed by the attitude that I frequently encounter when people talk about the realities of money and being a poet. People get uncomfortable, people get embarrassed, people get ghost out, which I think I invented that phrase maybe, but I like it if I did. And to be fair, people aren't widely comfortable talking about money outside of writing either. But the reason that I tell this story about the Minnesota State Arts Board is not to suggest that there was anything wrong with their decision. My application sucked because my poems sucked at that time and that's fair. But because I think that we as poets need to be able to stand up and say, I need help and not be scorned for it. So I want to talk about what this kind of help might look like. Part of the title of this panel is Democratic Patronage.

Speaker 3 (09:28):

And so I want to talk about a specific angle of this. I think maybe more than one of us might talk about crowdfunding in some shape or form today, but I want to look at a specific sort of case study, if you will, to see what we as poets can learn from that. Have any of you guys heard of the crowdfunding site Spot Us? Okay, spot Us was a journalism crowdfunding site that was founded in 2008. And the way it worked was that a journalist would pitch a particular story and would ask people to contribute toward getting that story funded. Or as a member of the public, you could go to the site and suggest a topic that you would like to see get covered. So for example, I might go there and say, Hey, I think a journalist should do a profile of that Minnesota State Arts Board guy and then I could contribute money toward getting that story written.

Speaker 3 (10:17):

I first heard of Spot Us when the writer Rachel Howard, who's published a memoir called The Lost Night, used the site to try to fund freelance dance reviews in San Francisco where she's an established dance critic. She posted a link to her pitch on Facebook and just as I was sort of about to go check it out and fund it spot us shut down. When I saw her post, I started thinking right away about how a platform like that might translate into poetry. A popular general crowdfunding site like Kickstarter I think poses maybe some problems for poets. First of all, Kickstarter has to approve your project and then you need to adhere to the system of rewards that Kickstarter has. So for 10 bucks you get a copy of my book for a hundred bucks, you get a copy of my book plus a vial of my tears or whatever, which means more work for us.

Speaker 3 (11:07):

Like Rita Ma was talking about, we don't need more work, but a format like Spot Us worked a little bit differently. You could say something like, I want to write a chatbook about Lady gva. People who believed in that project could contribute and you'd be able to use their donations to fund your writing, whether or not you met your goal if the donors agreed, which is a significant difference from Kickstarter for one and No Rewards, a model that seems like it would have fewer hoops than Kickstarter. And the fact that it's genre specific is really important because it means that you wouldn't necessarily have to fight through the noise of a vast number of other projects. People who loved poetry would know exactly where to go. I kept this idea in my brain and then when I was thinking about this panel, I decided it was time to investigate why Spot Us folded.

Speaker 3 (11:53):

So Spot Us was founded by one guy, this guy called David Cone in 2008. And it was so successful that it was bought out by American Public Media in 2011 and after its acquisition, David Cone stepped down and the projects funded percentage went from 98 to 37%. And so in an effort to figure out why that happened, American Public Media which now owned it, decided to conduct a review and they found a bunch of different things, but here's relevant for us. I think they found that the failure rate for writing projects was about 7% higher than for other projects that the explosion of other journalism crowdfunding sites made spot us as pioneering importance diminish. So the more of them there started to be the less anybody wanted to stick to just the one. And that overall journalism just wasn't a very large slice of the crowdfunding pie.

Speaker 3 (12:42):

It was like 0.13%. And so it wasn't a big deal to them to shut it down, which is exactly what they did. And when they did, they said, journalists, you can just always go to Kickstarter or Indiegogo. That should work just fine for you. And journalists, as you might imagine, were not super thrilled with that. So here are the takeaways for me for one, a genre specific site just for crowdfunded poetry projects would be the only one of its kind as far as I know. Feel free to tell me differently if you know otherwise, which would be an advantage if the lessons from Spot Us hold True, it could devote itself to the mission of our genre. It would allow poets to move forward with funds without necessarily needing to rely on a large number of donors to meet a goal. I'm not sure we can make any promises about failure rates because we are poets after all, but I think we would do our best.

Speaker 3 (13:35):

So there is one other difference that something like this would have versus Spot Us, which I think is also important to mention. Once a piece of journalism was funded and produced, it was made available for free under the Creative Commons license and it could be reprinted by any news organization and it had to be available to the public online. So maybe people were less inclined to back something that they knew that they could eventually get for free. Or maybe there's just a difference in mindset between funding journalism and being a patron of the arts, which I think carries a different weight for people. And as Rachel Howard told me, there's a whole different dynamic to getting people's beforehand, making them supporters of what you're doing rather than consumers of it. I think the hardest part would be finding a poet who knows computer code. So thanks.

Speaker 4 (14:35):

That was me. Shout whispering. Am I next? I am next. Hi. So I'm going to talk about a couple different things and I had this whole thing where I was going to start by talking about, and I'm going to tell you this story anyway, even though it just reinforces something you all already know. A month or two ago, my girlfriend and I were watching this documentary on Susan Sontag, which is amazing. And in the middle of it, she pauses it and she's like, I just have a question. I'm like, because you're this hyper intellectual visual artist, which could you possibly not understand? And she's like, how does she get any money? She's like, how can she afford to do these things and think these things? And I was like, I know because an adjunct and you're a visual artist and all that. And it was like, oh my God.

Speaker 4 (15:21):

There was just this moment where we were like, oh shit, you used to be able to just be a professor and that's what you did. And then you got to travel the world and write important things and think lots of thoughts and take sabbaticals. So I just wanted to sort of put out there that is not the world we live in anymore. Not that you all don't know this, but we do not live in this world. And the reality is that even if you get into this academic realm, it's a broken system and you're functioning within that. I also want to point out something we all already know, which is that we're entering M F A programs at a rapid, rapid pace, some of which are fully funded, some of which the one I went to will you just pay off for the rest of your natural life.

Speaker 4 (16:09):

And you just say that you're like, okay, so I'll be paying this off the rest of my life and it saved my life, so that's worth it. My life is worth being in debt forever. It really is most days. But to me there has to, there have to be some alternatives and those alternatives have to feed those of us who've gone through the system. It has to feed the poets who are doing the teaching and the education and it has to feed the people who may or may not be ready to go into M F A programs who may or may not ever want to do that, but have this desperate need and want to learn about how to write poetry better. Which doesn't necessarily mean that you need an M F A. Here's a big secret. Somebody else probably said this on a panel at some point, but I'm just going to go ahead and say it anyway.

Speaker 4 (16:54):

So we're in this cycle and I was going to write on the whiteboard. I get really excited about whiteboards, but I'm not going to do it where everybody goes into M F A programs and you go into it and you're like, okay, and then I'm going to have a book or seven and then I'm going to get an adjunct job and then I'm going to slog through that and then I'm going to get a tenure track and then they're going to eliminate tenure and I'll be screwed. So it's a vicious cycle. And so we think for me what's really important is that we have to develop some sustainable solutions. And for me, the key there is this question of sustainability and building sustainable lives for ourselves. I was fortunate enough to have the experience during my graduate school work to sit down with Marie who was one of my teachers on a day when she was feeling particularly candid and she was like, well, what are you going to do when you finish here?

Speaker 4 (17:43):

And she's like shaking her hair around and she's like, what are you going to do? What are you going to do when you finish here? And I'm like, oh, you overwhelm me. And I said, I'm going to get a book and then I'm going to teach. And she was like, why are you going to do that? And I said, because what you do? And she said, no, it's terrible. It's terrible. You want to teach all day, talk about poetry all day, and then you want to go home and write poems. You don't want to go write poems at that point. Do anything else, do anything else you can. And I'm like, I'm freaked out and I want to cry. But I always sort of held that it opened up for me this understanding that I could be a poet and I might be able to be a better poet if I didn't teach poetry all day long.

Speaker 4 (18:22):

And then I heard Lee Young Lee talk at the Dodge Festival one year and he was like, I work in a factory and I lift boxes and I do that to preserve my brain space for poetry. And now of course he doesn't do that because he's Lee Young Lee, he doesn't have to lift boxes anymore, but he did that. And so I want to talk for just a minute about the work that we could talk a lot about having to do different kinds of work or having to work at coffee shops or wait tables or manage offices or do whatever it is it takes to get by and there's that. But to me there's also a question of saying is it possible not to have to do more work but to say is there other kind of hard work we can do? And it's taken me a while and years of working in nonprofits and writing grants for them and that sort of stuff to figure out for myself what this is.

Speaker 4 (19:16):

And so I've been working lately to figure out how I can work with other people. And so I'm doing this thing that I'm calling growth coaching where I'm sitting down with people and saying, what lights you up aside from maybe the art you're specifically doing or the fact that you're hoping to pass the bar and saying, okay, how can we do that and how can you do that in a way that either makes you money or gets you the things you need? I mean, I barter this vision coaching with my chiropractor. She wants to leave this place where she works with these other chiropractors and open her own place. And so I'm like, great, you want me to read your tarot cards and tell you what's coming up and talk to you about where your vision is and that sort of thing and you'll fix my knees?

Speaker 4 (19:56):

And she says, sure. So that's another way to sort of step out of the structure and out of the systems that have been set up for us, I was talking, there's someone I'm working with who's literally through law school and thinking, and he's waiting for the bar and it's killing him. He didn't pass it last time and he's waiting for the next one. And I'm like, how do you feel about that? And he says, well, I feel like getting into the legal profession is just you have to get sort of jumped in. They just beat the shit out of you over and over and over and over again and I'm doing these unpaid slash tiny paid internships and all that and then eventually they let you in. And I'm like, well, what happens when you get in? And he is like, well, then I'm in and I'm like, talk to me about the system you're getting into.

Speaker 4 (20:39):

And so we talk about that and I'm like, what is it going to be like on the other side of a system that pummeled you on your way into it? And let's also talk about maybe other reasons you went to law school, which was to understand another broken system, but I'm like, you're a brilliant writer. Maybe you should be blogging about these things and not worrying about passing the bar because you can't think about it. Think about restorative justice. Think about other kinds of work you can do with this information you have that will also let you up, will let you feed your family, all those sorts of things. So I just think it's important for us to understand that there's kind of a new paradigm happening. We can get pissed about what's happening in terms of adjuncting and we should be mad about it.

Speaker 4 (21:21):

We shouldn't say things like adjuncts only make the same amount of money as fast food workers because that's wildly classist and horrible and implies that fast food workers, oh, how could we only make as much money as them? Like, well, they give you your coffee, but to understand that we're in this new paradigm where oftentimes we are talking about creating patchwork quilts of work and you create work and you figure out ways to maybe get paid for that you use these systems and it's not just going to be one thing anymore is really my point. With that, I'm going to talk very, very briefly about this whole Frida kalo situation that's going on with me. So I wrote this poem, Frida Kalo to Marty McConnell and then the internet took it over and now the internet thinks that Frida Kalo said it including this one particular line from it.

Speaker 4 (22:09):

It's all over Tumblr and it's all over Pinterest and all this, and there's little post-it notes that say Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Maybe you've seen it handwritten on a terrible post-it note or with stars behind it or Jasmine and Aladdin, which is really upsetting. So there's this whole thing that happened with it and it's blown up and people, this woman made a wall hanging of the line and is selling it on Etsy and then got really upset when I called her on it and was like, maybe just don't sell that because also Frida Kalo has an estate and stuff. So even if I didn't say it, but anyway, point being, I'm finally getting to the point where I'm like, okay, I have to get out ahead of this and also just connect with one of these websites where you can do print on demand and so then I will put the line on mugs and t-shirts and whatever and have some sort of passive revenue stream from it.

Speaker 4 (23:04):

I'm just going to have to suck it up and do that. That's fine, otherwise Hallmark is going to do it. So thinking about what are the places you can dip into that might generate that sort of stuff. You may not be fortunate enough to have somebody randomly on the internet attribute some line of yours to someone famous, but there might be other things people would pay for. If you write brilliant lines of poetry and you put them on a t-shirt, somebody might very well buy that because people buy stuff on t-shirts all the time. The last thing I want to talk about, and I was going to bring my phone up to time and I've no idea how long I've been talking, but it's not too bad I don't think because I talk fast, so I'm going to slow down. It has to do with the fact that a lot of people I know are starting to in stepping outside of academia and creating opportunities for people to learn about poetry and how to write poetry that is more impactful.

Speaker 4 (23:54):

I don't like to better poetry is the bullshit aesthetics questions, but write more impactful poetry, write better the poetry they want to be writing. They're starting to do more online workshops, they're starting to do more workshops in their homes, they're starting to do individual coaching and that sort of stuff. The trouble is we're all doing it in these little tiny isolated pockets and it's really hard to find. So all you can do is sort of go in a Facebook group and be like, I'm looking for an online workshop, and then there's this moment of silence and then everyone goes, I teach online workshops. I think they're pretty okay and it's just like this awkward, terrible self-promotion thing and I think it's really important for people to be able to access that. The only way that we're going to create a system outside of the system that exists in terms of the academia is for there to be ways for people to connect.

Speaker 4 (24:45):

And so a friend of mine and I are going to launch a website and it's going to be sort of like a Yelp, but for writing programs and that sort of thing. So people will be user reviews, it'll be sortable by I want a queer only workshop. I want a workshop that is just for people of South Asian descent. I want something online. I want one-on-one support. I want to be able to get my manuscript edited, that sort of thing, sortable and that way. And then the people can give reviews and be like, I had this amazing experience or like, ah, this was super creepy and I will never go back to this person's home again. Or that sort of thing. Legit that things like that happen. And right now we don't have any way to tell about it. It's important to me that these connections happen for people like pre M F A post M f A alternative to M F A, it's going to be called the U R L is just the writing list.com.

Speaker 4 (25:43):

Right now all that exists is it just says the writing list.com. Do you want to be on our mailing list? Let us know, but we'll probably be in beta this summer and launch by the fall. And really the idea with this is that it's a way for people to connect and to get the resources they need because we can look at US news and World report list of the M top M F A programs for whatever that's worth, but there isn't a central place we can go to find out, oh, Kim Ezio teaches these amazing online workshops. Rachel McKibbon teaches these amazing online workshops. You can work one-on-one with people. That sort of thing. I was astonished when I started sort of calling through and thinking about who I knew who did this, that there's so much out there. So I think I'm going to pretty much stop there. The biggest thing is that I just want to say that for me this question of democratization of support also has to deal with accepting the fact that we do live in a capitalist society, in a capitalist structure. And so we have to find ways to subvert that and also to function within that. And so that has to do with barter, it has to do with connection, it has to do with collaboration, and I want to urge us towards that. Okay,

Speaker 5 (26:58):

So I guess I'm next now. I love the idea of not doing more and I'm probably going to be talking about the exact opposite of that, doing a lot more. So I'm sort of a scrapper and I try and get money and in kind donations however I can. So I thought I'd list some very practical ideas of how I scrounged about and got money for a reading series. Much of my fundraising has revolved around a literary series called Kale Soup for the Soul, featuring Portuguese American poets reading work about family, food, culture, identity and immigration. As Amy Sarah Batista said, kale for the Soul brings together geographically diverse writers telling stories about who they are and not what they are. In the past four years, we have given over 30 events, readings, and workshops featuring 28 different Portuguese American writers in cities from coast to coast, the Midwest and Portugal.

Speaker 5 (28:00):

About 75% of our events are funded in some way through honorariums expenses or travel. How do we do it? It's all about connections and relationships. How do you do it? You ask everyone you know, people you don't know, friends of friends and those on the same path you are on. You tell strangers on a train about what you're up to, but mostly it takes a strong commitment from a small core group of people. Now I'm going to start with our reading in Chicago, which was started in 2011 and we actually read in Chicago in 2012 and here comes the hard work part. I googled close to 100 venues starting in the summer of 2011. Everything from bars to bookstores, Chicago Cultural Center showed the most interest and ended up donating a beautiful ballroom. Normally they rent rooms for weddings, but they also set aside space for cultural events and I was in California at the time trying to book a gig in Chicago and not knowing anyone there, so it made it a little more challenging as well.

Speaker 5 (29:07):

The room alone were reading was held normally rents for $3,000. After months of planning, the cultural center also decided to provide audio set up security and a bartender. When we first started out, they were very interested in our group and they were generous in this amazing room with stained glass windows. And as it continued, she's like, well, you need the director was like, you're going to need a bartender. If you have a wine bar, you're going to need security. This is going to cost this much, but as we work together, she says, well, I think we can pick that up. So at the end, we didn't pay anything. One of our writers was a member of Poetry Bordello in Chicago and they donated appetizers and a value of $200 through a friend of a friend. The Sons of Italy donated three cases of wine worth $360 because they were interested in our community through music schools.

Speaker 5 (29:59):

I contacted a local street musician, guitarist, Gabriel Chapman, who agreed to learn Portuguese songs and provide live music for nothing. All he wanted to do was hand out his cards. We ended up getting some donation for him, but he was just thrilled with the idea and so results. We had an audience of over a hundred with 500 views on livestream in the us, Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Macau, the Azores. We had interviews on TV news in Portugal. Monetary value of donations was about $5,000 East Coast tour 2013. How did we do it? After hearing Kale Soup for the Soul read in Lisbon in Portugal, the directors of three universities joined forces to bring kale soup to Brown, UMass and Rhode Island College to provide cultural stories and connections to their students. Once someone gets a picture of what we do, they start trying to figure out how they can plug this into their own environment.

Speaker 5 (30:59):

Like Tom Sawyer painting Fence. Our enthusiasm about Portuguese culture has an addictive effect. How can I fit this thing into my college? They begin to think about resources they may call upon and add to this core of an idea that they just witnessed. This is so great. How can I bring this to my community? This thinking turns a boxed wine and cheese event into a potluck bonanza banquet where you have local restaurants contributing food and bakers adding to the flavor. It becomes more, it is transformed from an academic activity to a celebration of all that is familiar and warm and life-changing. At Rhode Island College, we gave two readings and two workshops. Students received lunch and a tour of the school. Many were children of immigrants who were the first in their families to attend college at UMass Dartmouth. In the Portuguese archives, we had a reading and a q and a with refreshments including Kale Soup Results, the audience of 80 high school and community college students in two sessions at Rhode Island College, five poetry workshops about placemaking and community college students, an audience of 50 at Brown University.

Speaker 5 (32:14):

Total value of donations. We received travel in kind donations and some meals. The key to that was we got three different colleges who each had limited funding and they said We'll kick in one night for these four riders. The other college said, we'll kick in a little bit, but together they were able to bring us what I didn't mention to save on expenses, blood, sweat, and tears. One rider stayed with his family in Fall River, the other three writers shared a room at a Comfort Inn in New Bedford, two writers received faculty supplemental funding from their universities, which they didn't even know was available to them as adjuncts until we started thinking and generating ideas and they're like, Hey, I can get $500. So we all kind of work together with different kinds of donations and ideas. The car reading series at University of Illinois Champaign fall 2014, the car reading series sponsored travel for four riders for a reading at University of Illinois.

Speaker 5 (33:16):

A second reading in QA was held at the literature and language library on campus. What didn't I mention? To save on expenses, we used points from hotels.com. We also sold books at the bookstore to help with incidentals. Massachusetts Reading 2013, Salem, Cambridge and Boston, three venues working together again, the Boston Portuguese consulate provided a venue, a book table, wine and catered appetizers and paid 10 writers $50 stipends each. The Massachusetts Poetry Festival and Valenti Library offered honorariums Seattle 2014, the Luso Foundation in Portugal provided $800 travel stipends for each writer. We had five. We participated in a w p panel and an offsite library reading, which was recorded for N P R through Poets West Tricks of the trade to save on expenses. Kale soup readings are often planned during conferences when writers are already in town To save money on expenses, we utilize a combination of local and non-local writers, so you don't, instead of flying in four or five rider from California to New York, you use two or three local New York and then you fly in one or two from across.

Speaker 5 (34:34):

That way you don't have a reading that's all people from the same area, but you have a mixture and you can afford to have a group instead of just sponsoring one. Some writers receive supplemental funding from universities where they teach state council grants or independent firms like quick grants. This is from Los Angeles, the Department of Cultural Affairs. We use frequent flyer, miles discounts, hotel points, GoFundMe and whatever else we can come up with. We ask for funding from organizations that support our cause. Branding is everything. We could have been called the Portuguese Writers Association or the Luso American Academic Snobby Club, but no, we called it something else. We reached out to a sense of community, to a familiar touchstone, to a place where food acts as an entry point to so much more. Everyone who has a Portuguese heritage recognizes kale soup as comfort food as something they remember from childhood and once you taste it, you want more last bit of advice in the midst of it. Don't think about the steps, think about the dance. Thank you.

Speaker 6 (35:51):

This has been really great. The thing that's weird is that I feel like, I dunno, that's weird, but I mean I have thoughts about everything that everybody said and some of it I realized, I was like, oh, I've done that. I think I started being a poet in the seventies and so a lot of it was pre-internet and stuff. And so some of the things I have to say, one of the most bountiful financial things I ever did was running for president in the nineties because I got like 28 gigs. I mean I just toured 28 states in several months and stuff and it was just like people love the idea, but it was so much about, and it was like a pre-internet kind of self promotional device, but it was founded in a real feeling of discomfort with politics and what was going on exactly then.

Speaker 6 (36:37):

So I think it's interesting, I loath, I've only done a little bit of online teaching and it was just really creepy for me, but I was a do it yourself workshop teacher in New York and it's how I learned how to teach it was making flyers and putting 'em in the gate bookstore, putting 'em in the poetry bookstore, putting 'em in the performance bookstore. So I feel so when you asked me to be on this panel, I felt like this is home for me. The thing I thought about spot us, which I remember when that first, was that the right name when that first came out? I think the distinction between journalism poetry for me just is that whenever you look for money for yourself as a poet, the reason people are resistant is they think they're being asked to fund your body. It's like the problem I think with poetry is the body.

Speaker 6 (37:21):

It's sort of like everybody realizes that what we're really being funded for is not to write the poem but to support the person, the body that holds the poem. And that's always troubling to people, whereas journalism, and I think it's why running for president was more successful than being a poet because it's like, yes, for America I'll support you, but to write a poem, no, because that's just Eileen Miles. Susan Sandag wasn't an academic, she was really anti it. That was part of where she drew the line and I think part of it was a presumption of a certain was she teaching them? I think she didn't get a PhD, she got a graduate degree, but I don't know at which point maybe she did teach at some point, but I know that a friend of mine who was an academic was so aware of the fact that Susan was very snobby about the fact that I'm not an academic.

Speaker 6 (38:09):

That distinction was very important to her. Weird. I have one thing about Susan Sontag, but I wrote a little piece here. So my piece is called Naked Screaming Poets and my response to Rita, you said, whatcha going to talk about? I'm going to provide a narrative of when and how poets make money, how economic histories of cities and the rise of writing programs have contributed to poetic poverty and how L G B T invisibility equals no dollars. So everything I do in a context, this is a little writing problem and a little living problem. I want to connect to Rita's invite, which when I got I thought how can I not respond positively? The question of poetry and money is the question of my life. I sent her the above which I just read, which I call an abstract of what I plan to say and definitely everything is a performance for me.

Speaker 6 (38:55):

Everything is a way to kill time poetry. I think the major innovation a poet can always implement to make a living is dignity. Where do I stand with poet jokes? If we were a little more of a problem for our culture, there would be a lot of them. Jokes I think are how we police difficult communities in our culture and how we police difficult aspects of ourself. It's sort of like the fiction writers in a writing program always make jokes about the poets. I'm a sober person and people when they talk about their recovery, they always talk, oh, I was drunk and I was writing bad poetry. Poetry is like everybody's always recovering from poetry. It's sort of like back there and I think part of being the problem of being a poet is you're still back there in other people's thoughts about their own histories.

Speaker 6 (39:40):

I think the first money I ever got for poetry was for the workshop reading at St. Mark's in 1975 and I got 25 bucks and with it I bought a foam mattress and I always thought I'm sleeping on my first poetry money for 25 years or something. The most money I ever got for poetry was in 2015 and it was $30,000 from the foundation of a contemporary art, which is essentially Robert Rauschenberg's estate. This is the Susan font detail because in all the years it was one of those ones where you can't apply for you. We just get so it's privilege. It's like who gets the letter, who gets a phone call? And it was very close to me, it was very close to my community and I was always watching how many of the people who ever got it were queer and very few, virtually none, which was so weird since Robert Rauschenberg was queer.

Speaker 6 (40:28):

And what I saw that was so strange is the person who got it in the sixties was Susan Sontag for her poetry, which I thought that's very strange because Susan Sontag didn't write poetry that I know of and so I thought I realized this is poetry in that case was like a scam as a way to give Susan Sontag money by her friends, which I thought it was just like always Susan Sontag's branding was the thing that was supporting her rather than poetry. And that poetry was like an umbrella kind of. I think the poetry world I first affiliated myself with was always engaged with visual art and getting this check in the mail was an incident of basically was those chickens coming home to roost after 40 years. My money problem got different. In the nineties when I was in my forties, I began to more or less only do things that had to do with art or poetry to make my living my job.

Speaker 6 (41:20):

Job phase was over, but it didn't mean my money problems went over. It just meant that I had successfully contained my problem and made a decision that it would only happen here, my money earning from now on and it did. The grass got greener from that moment on. So I want to say two things about making money and writing poetry. One is that you should work your ass off getting good. I mean I just think that means reading a lot of poetry, old and new, writing a lot of poetry and looking for resonance in other art forms and making friends with those people. Your willingness to make friends of people in other art forms or fiction writers or art journalists or whatever makes the scene of the crime i e poetry larger both in influence and possibility. I've always struggled with the notion that I got introduced to a long time ago, which is that you have to make friends with people who are wealthier than you, which is really weird but very, I don't mean go after them literally though I've done that too, but you will encounter them and the hardest thing about being a poet without money is that you might resent the rich.

Speaker 6 (42:16):

The 1% sucks, there's no question about it. But since we are embedded in capitalism as every one of us, we have to say this, even as you speak, you really have to allow fellow feeling to even extend to people who publish with larger presses than you do and artists who sell their work for a fortune. Don't ask these people for things, extend to them access to your greatness. Be friendly. I don't mean smile, but not putting up a poet firewall against privilege, which I think is really hard. It's really hard to be graceful with people who have more money than you, but I feel like it's actually, it always pays off. The best thing poetry can do besides simply doing what it does, and I think this is a practical panel, so I'm trying to keep there in a practical place is always maintaining. The primary thing that we do is the work.

Speaker 6 (43:00):

If poetry is only a gig to get you someplace else, it won't work. Well actually it might get you there. I think poetry as a way of expanding and bleeding its moment into other moments, that's the reality of Patty Smith. It's like Patty Smith was a poet whose great career move was to leave poetry or ulab bliss if you were at this panel which was either in this room or a room that looked like this and it was filled to the rafters. And the fact of that piano that was so interesting was three out of four poets, two of whom don't discerningly write poems anymore, but poetry gave them this, which was another craft and a tremendous audience, great writing and spaciousness. So poetry is definitely an on the way sport that informs everything it touches, but I'm saying, I am saying that you must make it be the prime thing even in your existence, your breathing, your loving your thinking, you're organizing of reality poetry, it really isn't a money thing, but if you let it have this absolute beauty of that exquisite truth, I think that's its dignity, which is that it is something that doesn't have to do with money.

Speaker 6 (44:00):

I mean my joke in one of my poems is like, did you laugh at your mother for giving you oatmeal in the morning? I wasn't paying her and so on. I mean it's just that exquisite truth. It can possibly accidentally. The thing about free things and poetry being the one we're talking about it accidentally, especially if you don't get in the way of money, money can be one of its gorgeous side benefits and it happens actually a lot. You can be okay in the end and I dunno what the end means. I'm 65 years old, so maybe I'm at the end, but I'm sort of planning. This is the beginning of the end, which is another 30 more years, so I probably won't live past a hundred. But this prime thing, which is the beauty and the dignity and your dedication to the act of making a poem has to be and stay in your heart and ultimately guide all your acts.

Speaker 6 (44:43):

It is your boat. Okay, I mentioned economic realities and M F A programs. I'm going to go back and forth. That's how my boat acts. Certainly cheap rent makes a spaciousness of the poet possible. Well, the East Village was becoming a punk rock neighborhood and an art neighborhood, neither of which it is now poets were hanging out abundantly like barnacles. That is no longer possible now, which explains say the abundance of poetry in Portland, but I think honestly you could make anything work, but you've got to treat that economic problem like your studio and a community issue. I think six poets could live in a $3,000 apartment and institute quiet times and sex times and have a whole pattern of working in this cafe or that you don't have to be reduced to becoming a machine that only works or only gets a PhD as a way to exist in New York or someplace else expensive.

Speaker 6 (45:31):

Figuring out the dynamics of surviving in an expensive city that you loved is just as valuable, maybe more than getting an M f a because you can write about it whatever you did to figure out how to be here, you write about, you can make a blog about it. I think it would resemble the formation of a new institution, the formulation of that thought. How do I do this? Think of all the empty spaces in cities and beautiful places, parking the capital of the rich. I read on this benefit here the other night for Avenues, which was a homeless program and one of their programs is a home shelter program for teens. Like a rich dike couple has an extra bedroom and they take in a queer teen for a year. I believe the wealthy would also take in a poet. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think this is true.

Speaker 6 (46:13):

I was just in Marfa, thus the cowboy hat and there was so much empty real estate there of rich people and increasingly New York is coming that I think the wealthy would take and I have been taken in by the wealthy several times in my life and it was an amazing thing. I think this nonprofit could exist, but somebody would have to take on the job of making the impossible possible. Somebody would have to run the nonprofit. I do have so many other economic ideas. I'm sharing some here, but mainly I'm pushing them mostly to the side. I've had a good idea and it was my career and it's turned out well. It's turned out well. I'm not ashamed to say career in French means like carrier poetry is my love and my gig. Gig meaning carriage. Same idea. If I was the poet laureate, I would create a website matching poets to weddings, funerals, occasions, and it would be like a dating site or petfinder.

Speaker 6 (47:02):

I gave my nephew a poem for his wedding and it was so wonderful and great. We are so needed. It comes out of my own sense of how good my work is. And shouldn't it be distributed like rain or dandruff or a compelling idea? Don't ever forget that poetry has the power to change any room it enters, and that's what everybody wants. Poetry is more powerful than drugs. So I'm not the poet laureate because I'm relentlessly queer and gay. And worse I write about it because for me, my queer trans robust, Juan lesbian, homo organization of self is normal for this self. My least favorite phrases of how I might ever get described as a poet are in your face, badass and so on, punk too. I think those always hidden ways of saying queer in a public culture that would still prefer unless we're homogenized, white, young, normative, queer, middle class cheery, self-effacing without genitals, queer, we are better labeled discreetly in your face, badass, punk, something.

Speaker 6 (48:00):

And it really disgusts me because I'm totally committed to dropping the crumbs of my sexuality where it randomly exists in my consciousness in the world. It's not a topic at all. It's not an extremity, it's not a style. I'm no longer young, but I feel young because all these problems with sex and money and visibility are still mine, still compelling. But I'm thinking America probably can't have a low lesbian poet laureate who says the word pussy from time to time. I think America feels that that can't work. I'd like it to be wrong. I do connect this to the fundraising project of my life. We don't censor here in America in a frontal way. We censor culturally like the way a w p puts two queer people in a list of 50 featured presenters. And supposedly it doesn't mean shit. Well, what did it mean?

Speaker 6 (48:46):

I think it means censorship. And I think that that means fewer gay books will be bought this year. Fewer trans people will get jobs. Fewer gay, trans, queer by teens will think that writing poetry is for them. And what if they awful secret came out? The economic scourge of heteronormativity in this literary community has got to end right now. That's my demand. MFAs, I have no feeling. It's like the subway. No, actually I love the subway. It's like the bank. I use the bank. My money goes through the bank. I do not have an M f A, but I teach in them supposedly. Not having one may have made my economic life bloom slower. I'm not a slow blooming poet, but as an economically viable poet, I'm weigh that MFAs hold people. MFAs give people time and space and sometimes they give people debt. I think every school that has an M F A that charges people like $50,000 a year for two years should be charged with a hate crime.

Speaker 6 (49:43):

A hate crime against poets. The money is there with these schools. Lots of these schools have huge endowments and they just don't move it over to the M F A for the arts. It's really astonishing. I mean, Columbia for example, it's frightening that a school with that big an endowment somehow doesn't have any money for the arts. The money is there. The joke of all the poet jokes is that we will pay for time and freedom when it is ours to claim. I say don't debt or at the very least, don't pay it debt all you want, but don't ever fucking pay it. And I think that's a career figuring out how to avoid that debt repayment. We are on the verge of an economic collapse, which we all know, which is part of why it's such a good time for poets when the boat rocks, the poems pour when bad things happen, especially money things, right?

Speaker 6 (50:29):

The space of sudden devastation and pure economic terror is a crazy hairy teaming erotic studio. The best things in the world. I mean, when something horrible happens, you almost have an orgasm. It's like, oh my god. The best thing in the world. The best things in the world have been written in unbelievably bad circumstances. I'm not suggesting you court economic horror, but if you're there, write it up first. Make it pay. It only hurts if you are impotent. Economic devastation is power if you make it your show naked. Screaming poets is my favorite thing in the world. I just came from a residency in Marfa, Texas, funded by the Landon Foundation. This is the irony of my poor queer life. I get everything now and I subscribe my success to


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