10 Observations on Paying Poets

[scottwoods]

National Poetry Month is coming and poetry requests are in the air…or rather, free poetry requests are in the air. While I have written elsewhere on the mind-boggling and pioneering concept of paying for the performances and work of poets like any other artist, it remains a necessary observation to make now and then.

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Comments

[anonymous]

The name is Vocab (San Antonio poet) Scott I think maybe we spoke in passing at a nationals briefly. But aren't really very well acquainted My buddy Ariana Brown reposted this on fb. I gotta say I was just talkin to Chris Michael outta Austin about this today as I was giving him his terms of feature at my venue. We got side tracked talking about how we feature at venues and... I was telling him if ONE MORE person tries to book me talkin bout it will be good "EXPOSURE." I will go bananas on them

[scottwoods]

Vocab, thanks for checking in!
You make a great point about exposure: if you're booking me, I must already have SOME kind of heat. I mean, unless you just randomly book cats.

People need to start getting the money question up front, not because it's about the money, but because it's about respecting what I do enough to at least mention that it has value, whether you can pay it or not. THAT I can respect, and THAT will get you booked for free with me when I can do that at all.

[anonymous]

love that. so true. we, poets / artists, eat, dress, sleep, bathe, need materials to do what folks love for us to do... it's only right, only integrity to pay us something, for what you love to look at / hear. it's simply fair exchange.