THE WORKING POET

by Kurt Heintz

"Ben Barton is a working poet." OK... But what does that really mean?

When someone is called a "working poet," many assume that the person may actually make their living as a writer. But it's more likely that the reality is quite different. The person is working, and the person is a writer, but their work is not their creative writing. Neither so casual to regard themselves as a poetry hobbyist, nor so successful that they can live comfortably from writing commissions alone, the working poet faces a dilemma: The writing they must commit for survival of their art competes for attention with the work they must do for their own survival.

Ben Barton was the recent subject in such an examination of that dilemma on the BBC, and his story seems quite typical of poets in the UK and US. By day, he writes for a British travel magazine. By night, if he's not exhausted first, he writes as much poetry as he can. Barton's statement comes through both direct communiqué and in his work: The limited rewards of publication are not sufficient to ensure that his response to the lack of support for the published poets has been to create performance and video. Barton says, "I am currently working on my poetry collection The Red Book, which is coming out soon." He sees video as a means of promotion and as a vehicle for his creative work. "When the book is published," says Barton, "I will be creating more videos to accompany the text, making it available online. I'm very interested in combining text with performance and audio/visual elements. I am initially an actor, so these things are very important to me."

Barton nevertheless remains cautious about discarding text altogether in favor of performance and new media, saying, "Spoken-poetry is often seen as a less viable (or 'prestiged') form of publication, even though it reaches the masses more quickly. We live in the television age, and if poetry is to survive it must change with the times. I'm not saying printed poetry will become extinct -- far from it. Nothing will ever replace the feeling of reading a poem from a crisply printed, high-quality book. But variety is the key. Poetry can handle many formats, it's flexible."

Barton's situation also relates to the literary ecologies and economies between print, performance, and mass media. The "poevangelism" of the last decade created the boom population of aspiring writers today. But that popularity of poetry has not necessarily translated into more or better publishing opportunities for all those new writers. To find audiences, many writers resort to performance. Yet performance removes the "prestiged" status, as Barton puts it, from such poetry. And therein is a Catch-22. To enjoy a critical dialogue on one's poetry, and so refine one's text to meet a potential publisher's criteria, one must often resort to the very channels that may taint it against publishing.

Further, with so many people listening to poetry, who reads it? (See e-poets' earlier analysis of the decline of literary reading, as reported by the NEA.) And if the attention economy of poetry is consumed with performance, how can that economy positively support publication for those writers to wish to go into print? There are multiple pathways to Barton's point, that the present readership and the quality of that readership is probably not sufficient to support a good, emerging writer.

THE VIEW FROM HERE

By embarking upon video and the mass media, Barton is taking a less-traveled path toward the public recognition and discourse he needs so his writing can take its own next step forward. We wish him well. As online keepers of poetry video longer than any other poetry website in our region, e-poets.net knows a thing or two about the potential of new media to extend poetry to new audiences, and we see much promise there.

But also like Barton, we see value in literature's traditions, too. As anyone who's been to an open mic can say, the credo, "It's all good," obviously isn't. Editors serve many purposes, one of them being to keep good writers from making fools of themselves. As poets self-publish and distribute their work in channels outside traditional print, we still see merit in the editor's prerogative, a more clinical way to keep it real.

Originally published by e-poets.com, November 2004