The onion union
Every self-published poem on the internet is a revolutionary anarchic act. We reject the capitalist economic system when we say, "This is free."
Then again, they're hardly knocking down our door, begging us to commodify and sell our poems. But I say, "Embrace it."
We must face the fact that, on average, our work has no monetary value. In the big capitalist ledger, poetry has been assigned a zero (or nearly a zero, or a rounding error). After all, no poet has ever survived on the profits of his poems entirely; they depend on patrons, other employment, or government subsidy.
That other great anarchic tool, the Internet, gives us the place where we can conduct our own reclaimed poem-commerce. The poem is interactive, the poet present and accessable. Imagine walking into an art gallery where next to each painting the painter stands, ready to talk about his work. He is unpaid, or more accurately, he is paid solely in emotional terms by interaction with the people who stop by. How wonderful a world for poets to be so accessable! And how beautiful to be outside the system, with nothing to lose economically!
Let's embrace our marginality, because it gives us free reign, total creative control over our work's ultimate destiny. Join me. Join us. Join the Onion Union.
(By the way, if we were union, what would our collective agreement look like?)
Then again, they're hardly knocking down our door, begging us to commodify and sell our poems. But I say, "Embrace it."
We must face the fact that, on average, our work has no monetary value. In the big capitalist ledger, poetry has been assigned a zero (or nearly a zero, or a rounding error). After all, no poet has ever survived on the profits of his poems entirely; they depend on patrons, other employment, or government subsidy.
That other great anarchic tool, the Internet, gives us the place where we can conduct our own reclaimed poem-commerce. The poem is interactive, the poet present and accessable. Imagine walking into an art gallery where next to each painting the painter stands, ready to talk about his work. He is unpaid, or more accurately, he is paid solely in emotional terms by interaction with the people who stop by. How wonderful a world for poets to be so accessable! And how beautiful to be outside the system, with nothing to lose economically!
Let's embrace our marginality, because it gives us free reign, total creative control over our work's ultimate destiny. Join me. Join us. Join the Onion Union.
(By the way, if we were union, what would our collective agreement look like?)