Poems Are Only Mine to Give Away (Part I)

A section of my bookshelf is dedicated to my most delicate, most precious books. They are hand-made, photocopied, stitched, or held together by binder clips. They are zines and comics. There’s a hand-sewn book of poems and poem-recipes written by five Kundiman poets during our residency at Marilyn Nelson’s Soul Mountain retreat. Kate Greenstreet’s chapbook Called is sheaved in a thin piece of linen and embroidered by a zigzagging line of red. And there’s a series of poems about New York City by Hossannah Asuncion, tucked in an envelope made out of a subway station map.

As young poets, my friends and I regularly made books of poems and them gave away to each other. They were gifts of love—like gifts of water and wild strawberries, the scent of violet, the clouds that race across the sky before the coming storm. Eula Biss, in Having and Being Had, notes that when she thinks about the gift economy she feels a sense of nostalgia. And she wonders if this nostalgia comes from when she was young and lived among poets. Her experience echoes mine: “The poets I knew made their money like everyone else, as teachers or bartenders, but what they did for poetry, and for each other, was most often given away,” she writes. “They weren’t trading for reputation or influence—none of us had any of that yet. But we had the pleasures of exchange.”

The poems that arrive on the page are not mine. Or, the best ones are not mine. They are gifts that I channel or craft, that I labor over or dash off in a moment and return to years later to reconfigure whole. They are echoes from the ancestors or rumblings of the earth that I scoop up or spill across the page. They are hours of my life forgotten and then suddenly appearing in tercets.

The only claim I have to these poems is the same claim that a riverbed has to the water that flows over its mud, that a dandelion has to the crown of seeds it creates, that a catalpa leaf has to the shade it casts. I might be a vessel, a carrier, a creator of poems, but they are not wholly of me and they are not mine to keep. They are only mine to give away.

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In the eye of the storm that is late racial capitalism, the work I am most drawn to—writing poems—has little monetary value. I wrote my second book of poetry over ten years, and my publishing contract came with a $2000 advance.* Sure, I’m a low-profile poet publishing with a small independent press. So, let’s look at the U.S. Poet Laureate, arguably the most prestigious position a poet can hold in the U.S. That position comes with a stipend of $35,000 with a $5000 travel allowance. (As a point of comparison, the CEO of Microsoft earned more than $77,000,000 in 2019—and he was number nine on the list of top 10 highest paid execs.)

Everyone participating in these transactions around the business of poetry—me, my publisher, Joy Harjo, the Library of Congress—is well aware that the dollar amount does not match the time, the labor, the creative energy that goes into writing a book of poems or being a poet. But we live inside capitalism where we are expected to exchange money for goods and services. In this system, poems and poetry become goods and services that are bought and sold for a very low price.

When poets are paid for writing poems, the (often) small amounts are generally subsidized by grants from the government, foundations, or corporations.** Poems, some grant makers acknowledge, play an important role in human society. People turn to poems in trying times or joyful times. Poems appear in our contemporary rituals—weddings, funerals, graduations, inaugurations. Poetry marks moments and transitions in our life and society in a way that prose simply cannot. The experience of entering into a poem can be transformative.

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A poem has the capacity to ground us in ourselves—in our bodies and spirits. I love how the Irish poet Pádraig Ó Touama put it in an interview: “For me, poetry is so physical, and so much linked…to the question of breathing. A day without poetry for me is a day when I don’t feel like I have been in my body.” Poetry also can help us connect to what’s outside our bodies: something larger than our own heartaches and pleasures, something beyond the struggle of trying to make a living in an economic system based on the exploitation of people’s labor and the planet’s gifts.

Because of that—because poetry can put us in touch with the divine, with the fire of the human spirit, with—if we allow it—the deep grief of living in a world that is anti-Black, systemically racist, misogynist, homophobic, and ableist; because poetry can fire people up, can make us question a part of our lives—small or big—can make us feel, for a moment, transported or changed—because of all this, poetry is at least a little bit dangerous.

I’m not saying poetry by itself will bring revolution. But I do believe it’s not good for capitalism and white supremacy to have a lot of poetry going around, for poetry to be given too much attention or to be too accessible. Both of these systems function by keeping people disconnected from each other, by emphasizing the primacy of the (white) individual, by masking the reality that we are all deeply and inextricably connected to each other.

Poetry can wake us up to the truth that we need each other, that we are of each other, that we have a responsibility to ourselves, each other, to all beings. What would happen if poetry was recited every morning on TV and radio, everyone carried a book of poems wherever they went, and eager fans awaited the latest “drop” from their favorite poets? How much more receptive might people be to the reality that we need to tear down our current structures and systems and create new ones that will ensure the survival and thriving of all creatures?

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* Yes, I will tell you the numbers in my contract because the taboo around telling each other what we make is part of how capitalism works, part of how we stay apart and suspicious, rather than organize together to transform an exploitative economic system.↩︎

** I want to note here that I am not speaking of the world of academia, which is, of course, how many poets actually make a living—selling their labor, time, and energy to teach students how to write poems or compose essays. And within academia there is a whole world of commerce and trade, politics and favors, which I don’t know much about and can’t speak to because I am not part of it.↩︎