The Currency of the Poet

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The poetry group I am in recently noticed it had been going for more than two decades. Though I’ve been in it more than fifteen years (I’ve lost count), I joined mid-stream; others had been in it from the start, others had come and gone. The group meets every other week; the purpose is to share work and respond to it. As someone who grew up Catholic in the Appalachian Mountains, it has always, as an entity, felt familiar. It’s always there, a group with common beliefs and rituals not shared by most of the people around me. I don’t have to go. I am welcome if I do. And, if I do, and bring a poem, it will be made stronger for it, with love and toughness, as these are amazing poets with keen eyes. Their noticing is their love, and they have made me a better poet. I have written two full-length collections of poetry and two of my four chapbooks with their guidance. 

But the help I get with my poems, I realized, when the talk began about the group, is secondary to something else. Something else even more fundamental, not directly, or at least obviously, poetry-related. What is it? What are we? Whatever it is, this way of living, this mouth, it has sustained me. 

Maybe it’s because the life of a poet is one that requires constant navigation, especially in a culture that does not value that choice, does not value any choice that is non-commercial, cannot be sold. To find others on the path is life-giving.

And the conversations that arise from the poems are about what is essential to being human: issues of racism, grief, social justice, mental illness, just to name a few. 

When our family went through a soap opera-worthy series of tragedies (brain tumor, cousin electrocuted in Egypt, blood clot...), it was the poets who showed up at our door with food, kind ears to listen, even a therapy dog visit. When our asshole landlord threatened us about our pets, poets sheltered our cat. When we've gone through stuff with housing, kid crises, questions of vocation, it's to the poets that I turn. They have shown up in ways that have gone far beyond work colleagues, other friends, and blood relatives. 

I turn to my fellow poets as I hear some do to life coaches. How should I respond to this rejection? Should I pursue this job? And also: my child is suffering, my mother is dying, how do I live? Perhaps it is most expedient to say that I turn to the poets to figure out how to be human. 

Poetry is one of the only non-commodified (relatively speaking) pursuits left, so maybe that’s why community within it goes well beyond line breaks, imagery, and all the other things that help us revise the poems. 

Poetry is an anti-capitalist venture. That may not be its aim. But by not involving itself in the food chain of capitalism, which consumes and subsumes everything in its wake, poetry is, by nature, anti-capitalist. 

One time I was asked to read a poem, “Chant of the Bourbon Bacchante,” which, you can imagine, had a lot to do with whiskey. It was for a fancy book opening/party for an art book about cocktails. How fun. It would be at a swanky uptown house. There would be a brass band. 

I was young and living in the French Quarter without a car (which would be true until after Katrina). It took all my courage to ask about cab fare to get there. There was awkward silence. I held my breath. There had been, of course, no mention of a payment or fee. It was, wasn’t it, an honor for me to have the “exposure?” The organizer very un-ironically explained that they could not help pay for my cab fare because there was the brass band to pay, the sound person, the caterer, the lights, etc., etc. Poetry is clearly not considered a commodity, a gig to be arranged. It is subservient, expected though ignored. Something to offer a splash of authenticity in the glittering emptiness. It is a volunteer position. And you are lucky to be asked. 

When my husband, Khaled, and I went to Nicaragua as part of an international poetry festival, there was fanfare when the poets landed. We read in squares near markets and through the center of Granada as a parade of poets marched through town, reciting, people crowding sidewalks to see. We got free breakfast just for saying, “soy poeta.” We were stars. When we lived in Egypt during the revolution, poetry was sung and chanted in the streets, part of the graffiti strewn across the walls of power. Poets’ voices were an essential part of the resistance.

In the U.S., of course, we have rarely mattered. Though people turn to us at times of great loss, funerals, for example, sometimes weddings, times when people tend to need, but not have, words to contain what they feel. But poets are definitely not part of most people’s daily lives in the U.S. Back in the years after Hurricane Katrina, when entertainment licenses weren’t being given out, the poets carried on in the back alley of the Dragon’s Den every Thursday night. We required no license because we were not considered entertainment. Even though every folding, wobbly seat was filled.

Of course, New Orleans is no ordinary American city. The poets thriving here post-Katrina when nothing else was speaks to why so many of us make it home. Those of us in exile from it crave the broken and do not trust the brightness and functionality of other places. I moved to New Orleans, mostly, because it was the one place I’d been where when I answered what-do-you-do with I’m-a-poet the other person did not follow up with some version of what-do-you-really-do. The cab-driving poet friend who helped me get set up here used to keep poetry books on his dash and hope that people stole them. The few times a book was taken, he’d write down which were missing with great interest. One of the country’s oldest and most godforsaken cities, perched on the edge of the Gulf’s oblivion and left to drown—of course it’s where the poets go. There is nothing practical about it. But there is duende. And what you do is not synonymous with how you make money, i.e. what you are worth. 

Soul has a different kind of currency. When everything is sold and broken, and no one has any language for it, it will be to the poets, their emotional midwives, everyone will turn. And our value will be clear. Viva la poesía.

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Andy Young's second full-collection, Museum of the Soon Departed, was chosen for the inaugural Patricia Spears Jones Award and will be published by Camperdown NYC next year. She is also the author of All Night It Is Morning (Diálogos Press, 2014) and four chapbooks. She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Southern Review, Pank, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Cortland Review. Her poems have also been featured in contemporary and flamenco dance productions.

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