Is poetry a profession? Ever since Queen Anne of England introduced copyright in 1709 to get rid of the petulant begging of practitioners of the arts (a mindset that has survived to this day), people who have made a living from poetry can number in the tens .
Yet, poetry is the highest art, the most distilled and sublime sign of genius.
However, it has happened that up to now those who write poetry, even to support themselves, have had to look for some other support activity.
Charles Bukowski, for example, he worked as a postman in Los Angeles, an experience he told us about himself in the Post Office. Emily Dickinson she was unemployed and no one knew what she did all day.
If the poet has a barely passable voice, how Bob Dylan (words of Joan Baez that the voice really had it as well as the words), can become a legendary minstrel able to sell the rights to his repertoire for 500 million dollars.
What ends in 740?
Montale, was a music critic for a large national newspaper and translated other poets such as TS Eliot who, in turn, taught. There was a strolling poet and storyteller by name Dario Fo who lived performing on stage with his wife Franca Rame, a kind of family business.
Eventually, it may happen that the Nobel Prize which today is worth 10 million Swedish crowns (914.604 euros at today's exchange rate), a tidy sum all at once.
But poetry alone has generally never made big write-ups in the tax returns of those who practice it. Until today, one might say. Because from what we read in the "Financial Times" poetry is starting to spin six-digit numbers.
It seems that a new generation of poets and poetesses is scrambling to find brilliant new ways to make their verses pay off. As? Posting them on Instagram or, more lucratively, selling them in the metaverse associated with non-fungible tokens.
Arcadia the highest paid poem of all time
One evening in November 2021, a poem in five cantos was auctioned at Christie's in New York, Arcadia. It sold for $525 as an NFT.
Arcadia, is a video-poetry in the form of abstract animation lasting nine minutes and 48 seconds, set to music with relaxing sounds (ASMR type) by the musician RAC. Listen to it with some concentration.
Its creator, the thirty-year-old British poet of Russian origin Arch Hades, became “the highest paid living poet of all time”.
The video was then exhibited at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence in the Let's go digital exhibition on November 15th. The poem will also be released in book published by Black Spring Press. 98 pages priced at £14. The advance is not known.
The Genesis of Arcadia
Hades wrote Arcadia in just a month during the lockdown. After the cancellation of the book tour, she decided, together with musician friend RAC, to transform the poem into a NFT.
“Suddenly we were like fuck, we have to make money off this stuff,” Hades said. She and RAC had already made a $72 nest egg with an NFT of a 4-line handwritten postcard that they animated with background music. You can view it , promising. Each word had yielded $4.200. They were convinced they could do more and better.
So the two girls commissioned a video that represented some key visual elements of Arcadia such as a glass of water half full, a shiny red apple, some fluttering sheets. And a contemplative video of excellent workmanship came out of it.
A friend who worked from Christie's he was therefore able to get the proposal to the right person.
“With Arcadia, the two artists have established a new level of storytelling and emotion in collaborative, interdisciplinary NFT-based art,” she said. Noah Davis, then head of digital sales at Christie's.
The reflection of this young Christie's manager prompts another: it is not that in metaverse art the concept of total art sought after and advocated by Richard Wagner?
A total art that finally meets its patron who resides in the boundless lordship of the cryptosphere. And come on, there's room…
Hera Lindsay Bird, from New Zealand
Then there's the 35-year-old poet from Thames (an hour and a half from Auckand by scenic ferry) who has written two delightful collections of poetry with fabulous graphics, which have seen them go viral.
La Monica poem, which begins with an invective against a character from Friends (on Netflix) turns into a reflection on love for a friend. Monica's online popularity has paid off in real terms: she helped sell the rights to Penguin. Bird has no doubts about her poem “Well, I aspire to the mainstream”.
Gboyega Odubanjo, the rapper-like poet
The London poet of Nigerian origin Gboyega Odubanjo has sparked a flurry of offers among major publishers for his next collection of verse. Title, Adam.
The newspaper "The Guardian" has chosen one of his poems oil musictaken from the collection Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency, edited by Kate (Valley Press, £12.99) as the poem of the month.
The versifying of this young poet is very close to Rap. It is right what Odubanjo thinks and says:
«Today there are many ways to spread, show and publish poetry. And there are also many kinds of poetry to grapple with. And people who read poetry are generally decent.'
Real! People who read poetry are certainly decent.
… and many, many others
No, I have the space here to dwell on it. However, I want to list a few names from the list, not as extensive as the one that Leporello rattles off, that Baya Simons, the young journalist of the "Financial Times, wrote in her article on the young "Instapoets of meta verse" as she labels them.
There is the Canadian Rupee kaur, which has sold over 10 million books of his poetry, the Britannica Greta Bellamacina and there is Amanda gorman, 24, who closed an enviable contract with Penguin Random House after the reading at President Biden's inauguration. On the Capitol Hill stage she mesmerized the audience with her impassioned performance of The Hill We Climb and, perhaps more, for her outfit: a superb yellow Prada coat down to her ankles.
Fifty-year-old Brian Bilston
However, this is not just a youth phenomenon. There is also the 50-year-old, moved with children, Brian Bilston, "Twitter laureate poet", where he has 80 followers.
His collections of verse, such as Alexa, what is there to know about love? release in 2022 and 50 Ways to Score a Goal and Other Football Poems for children aged 6 to 8, were published by Macmillan, one of the big four who will perhaps become the big three with the acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin-Random House, currently pending antitrust.
These poets have turned their social feeds into NFTs and books, contributing to a 40% increase in poetry sales between 2015 and 2020, with 41% of buyers aged 13-22.
And in Italy? For the moment we are very busy discussing the ministers of the new government whether they should be in the technical or political area. But the poets are there, perhaps the context is missing. But there will be.
Source: Baya Simons, Meet the poets finding new and inventive ways to publish, How to spend it, Financial Times supplement, September 22, 2022.
Before you go
Memorial. The human rights association banned by Putin won the Nobel Peace Prize together with the Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatsky and the Kiev Center for Rights. A well-deserved award to Memorial also for the work carried out in Italy with publications, conferences, activities in schools. I take this opportunity to inform you of the new edition of The Nobel Peace Prizes and the World Wars by Giuliano Procacci, one of the historians most sensitive to the contemporary, author of fundamental studies on pacifism and Russia.
