Make Money with Poetry

In which I make ink for an International Poetry Prize

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.
—Joan Miro

Happy Poetry Month. Let’s talk about money.

The squirrels look glossy. The branches are branching. Whole trees are visibly blushing with sap and building whirling pollen mobiles. The flowers are dressed to go clubbing. The ants are renovating new rooms and tunnels for their inverse sandcastles. Everything is busy. And joyful. And gainfully employed. It is Spring.

So why have I been worrying about my finances? Why have I been feeling low? I have been recovering. And if I wasn’t living in a capitalist society this wouldn’t be so much of a problem, I say to myself from the comfort of my Casper® bed. I mean shouldn’t everyone in a more fair society be able to follow their own nature and rest when they need rest without having their rhythms divided up [and ?] down to the last second. True, except that in nomad times, when the height of the grasses and the curve of the moon told the horde it was time for the spring forage, wouldn’t the slow contemplative types be left out on the steppes to fend for themselves? Probably an even worse fate for slow-moving or mopey cave people. And even a billion years ago in the microbial age, the amoebas were probably busy collecting or fleeing or wrapping their pseudopods around some sleepier amoeba. All life is hungry.

Ok. Well then how to diversify my ink business. I do make money writing books about ink, offering workshops, and more and more I am indebted to you, my readers and subscribers to The Colour for spreading the word and keeping me researching, writing and building a community of natural colour folks. But what if the real money is in poetry?

When the Poetry Prize Person called me up a few months ago and asked if I wanted to make some artwork for the long list of the Griffin Poetry Prize, I got out of my funk and said yes. I have been for years noticing the connection between poetry and ink and trying to find more crossovers and collaborations and possibilities with poets. The Griffin Poetry Prize is one of the largest and most prestigious in the world. It was founded by some of my favourite Canadian poets and it is also the body responsible for creating a poetry memorization contest in schools across Canada called Poetry in Voice, and building one of my favourite statues in the city, and most significantly, it hosts a beautiful night of poetry in a darkened theatre of curved wood and balcony seating that feels like some elite night of classical music except that the thousand plus audience is all there to hear poetry, and somehow the elite literary types are sitting with the scruffy live-aloner Marxists, and you might end at the bar at intermission talking with Anne Carson, a chapbook publisher, and a Latin American translator. For a moment every year in Canada, money and poetry meet.

The Poetry Prize Person thought I could do something inky to celebrate the announcement on social media of the long list. I said yes and we agreed on a price without quite yet knowing what saying yes would mean. A few days later 10 books of poetry arrived at my studio in a box delivered by secret courier (nothing had been announced yet) wrapped in brown paper, and I set to work.

I read. Every line. And at first I wasn’t sure that I had the right to, and did’t even want to try to sum up years of a poet’s work in a blob of ink or few brushstrokes of colour. When I am stuck, I go back to the materials. I try to forget myself and just absorb rather than try to figure out. I read the books over again with my notes app open writing down every time a substance was mentioned that I thought I could make into ink. I told the Poetry Prize Person that I wanted to make custom ink colours and then custom ink tests of each book of poetry. Each happening, with water and pigment, would draw upon the ingredients of the poems that I was able to find marbled through each collection.

This was easy because:

1) The books were a striking range of some of the best poetry from around the world published in the last year, each one feeling utterly singular.

2) The people at Griffin Poetry Prize trusted me to encapsulate the spirt of each poet’s work

3) I trusted the books themselves to offer up a set of ingredients and

4) I trusted my early spring foragings and whatever strange bottles and packages and jars that I had fermenting over the winter to do their thing and provide texture and colour and moments of something beautiful that would be a burst of colour on social media and maybe get more people reading more poetry.

Well for some of the books, this process was easy. A few pages into Ishion Hutchinson’s School of Instruction. I found the following stanza which without alteration conjures up a list of ingredients for my sort of ink.

sugar: rum; coffee; rice: logwood; bauxite; 
oranges; lime juice: (for the prevention of scurvy):
mahogany propellers: and 9 aeroplanes;
11 ambulances, cotton (for balloons)

Other times it felt harder. Ben Lerner’s poetry book The Lights keeps its sensory nouns to a minimum and when an ingredient is mentioned, it usually feels more ironical than physical or inky. As a result, the only ingredient I could find in the book that made it into my notes app was “delicate carnation.” At first I thought, Ah ha! because I had recently found a dried up carnation on the sidewalk near the bars that I imagined was the remnants of a failed drunken prom date corsage. This ingredient had the sort of humour and not-quite-romantic quality which felt just right, and I was pretty sure that its petals could provide at least a pale pink. But then, after sending in my preliminary ideas, it turned out that a carnation was the only object I was told by my bosses not to use. Other than that one constraint, I was absolutely free to make ink and colour and a distillation of this poetry into whatever abstract blob or brushstroke that felt right to the material, so it didn’t seem right to demand a use for the crumpled carnation. And anyway, later, on closer inspection of the book, I found reference to birch tar, anti-depressants, fennel flower pollen, tea, and burning paper —a combination of substances which sent me down all kinds of promising rabbit holes.

I loved going through each book with ingredients in mind and in doing so I felt I got into the skin of the poems in a way that felt alive and true. The process was not so much critical or academically investigative but rather like an almost physical response. A distillation. A recombining of tones. It made me feel, and not for the first time, like poetry is a kind of inkmaking.

Making the inks and letting ingredients happen together felt like trusting meaning to emerge from the inherent chemistry. I loved collecting peculiar things from forest and sidewalk and back alley and the storage space under my front steps with the attitude of a poet-forager. I loved the instinctual research, and I even mixed up some mud into a usable pigment. A mud that I had been sent in the mail from a deep sea exploration of octopus habitats (more on this in some future newsletter).

Ink and poetry work pretty well together. I read a lot of poetry and have some very close friends who write poetry, and one of my favourite classes in university that still feels like a part of me was a course in Canadian poetry. So poetry just sort of naturally resonates in my life. But its more than that. What I’m especially drawn to is the ridiculousness of poetry. That it makes no money. That most poems are bad or have already been written or are so obscure that they mostly only speak to the poet themselves. That sometimes, the end product of a whole life dedicated to poetry is just one or two poems that anyone remembers after you are gone, and that’s if you are lucky. Its brave.

It’s the taking seriously of a process that’s close to your heart but that may never pay you back and may just leave you looking foolish that makes poetry a kind of life-stunt. Having read so much about the importance of poetry I want to praise its small, practically invisible unimportance too. And as foolish and broke and embarrasing as it is to choose poetry-making, it is low-key heroic. It’s beautiful in its almost impossibility, beautiful in its edgy idea of spending a life in commitment to attention to feelings shaped into small clusters of words that follow a song-like logic. Beautiful in its fine-tuned compression. The care that poetry-making so often has for fine senses, for imagination, for a kind of shaping of inner ideas that is not easy or obvious. I guess I like the romantic nearly impossible ideal of a life dedicated to a practice that’s unlikely to pay in money or fame or fans.

I want to show you what I made but I also want to convey my hopes. That this series of inktests be a series of flags celebrating each individual life that made each of these individual books. I want these inktests to be a testament too, to the prize itself because I believe in championing someone weird doing something weird in a weird community and being supported in that. I want the artwork I made to be a little shout out to poets getting paid. To sensitive, contemplative types of all kinds getting paid. I appreciate a world of poetry prizes. I appreciate a Canada that supports a poetic budget with money for the sentiment-mining sector, money for the natural resource of imagination, money even for the economics of a non-money-based value exchange, for a future engineering science of un-moorings, for the advertising sector of the uncommodifiable. A budget not just for clearly valuable cultural works, but also for living, unruly, even sometimes un-beautiful beauty.

April is poetry month in Canada and the US. It’s also when the federal budget gets announced. Maybe you are broke too, trying to find a way through money matters to get free of money and practicalities for a moment. Outside your window, everything is busy. Everything is hungry. But if you are open to it, poetry occasionally, ridiculously, impractically, unsellabley, and then for a split second, transcendently, makes its invisible net for meaning. For a split second, this gossamer net captures some glints from the sun outside your door and you can’t help getting out of bed and noticing— no, becoming— spring.

If you are in Toronto, let’s meet at the bar at intermission of the Griffin Poetry prize at Koerner Hall, where the winner of the world’s largest international prize for a single book of poetry written in, or translated into, English will receive $130,000. The other shortlisted poets each receive $10,000. Sometimes it takes money to not think of money and just be free.

For members of the Colour Lab I will send you (Tonight!, Join Now! Support Poetic Ink! ) The complete set of poetry images to celebrate the Griffin Poetry Prize and some rare behind-the-scenes making-of images which show you some of the fascinating things I ended up making ink from.

As always yours,

Jason