Changing Your Approach to Poetry: Perspective on Growing the Poetry Industry
The poetry industry can only grow if more of us are being intentional in our approach to the craft and making strides for the industry. We at Poet Life Podcast sat down with Pages Matam, and he agrees.
He says, “There should be more Rudy Francisco’s on Jimmy Fallon. More Brandon Leake’s winning America’s Got Talent. More poets in writers’ rooms for TV shows, films, and commercials. We should have a league for the poetry slam. Why aren’t there unions for when something like COVID happens?”
Let’s hear more about Pages’ approach to the poet life and how we can do our part to grow the poetry industry.
Evolve your approach as your goals change
Your goals and approach to your poetry career should never be stagnant. If they are, you’re most likely not growing. Take Pages for example.
He says, “[My approach] continuously evolved because the goal is to change, right? The goal is to create intention. It builds your work ethic. I’ll say, if you have a goal, you create an intention to reach that goal. And how you reach that goal is what creates your work ethic.”
His first goals transitioned from becoming the best writer/performer you can be to how can you make money with this? And that’s the state a lot of poets are in or struggle to move between: Going from working towards being the best poet you can be to learning how you can make money from poetry.
“And that’s operating from the place of capitalism,” Pages explains, “because we live in a capitalistic world. Because of that, we’ve got to get money so we can pay bills. We need to get out of the struggle or to flex.”
Talent needs to evolve too
But it’s not enough to stop there. Once you’re out of the struggle or once you’ve had the opportunity to flex that you’re able to make money from your poetry, there’s got to be somewhere to go.
And Pages knows that: “Now, when that goal happened, I started moving towards the way of setting myself up in learning patterns, working, and putting myself in positions to continue to get this work while still working on my craft. Because talent needs to evolve here.”
Look, this next piece of wisdom is too crystal clear coming from Pages’ own words to paraphrase, so we’ll let him say it best:
“[You have to] study poets; read other poets, other writers; watch other poets and other writers. Learn about stage presence by watching comedians, right? Not a lot of poets are studying because we have this belief that poetry is this intuitive thing.
“We’re like, ‘You can’t tell me about my intuition and how I feel.’ And that’s true, sure. I can give you that, but I can tell you that the way you wrote about those feelings was poor technique. I can tell you that the techniques you used, the skill set you used to convey those ideas, those stories, those thoughts were poorly constructed. Not well executed. Not nuanced enough.
“And of course the flip side of that is the elitism, right? Because there’s a lot who don’t do the work, but then there are the ones so far removed because they have the mindset of, ‘I have this achievement, 14 different degrees, 17 MFAs, and this book award and this book award, blah, blah, blah. That if you don’t write like this or that, then your work is not valuable.’ So there are extremes to both sides of the equation. Oftentimes though, it’s easier to remedy elitism than it is to remedy the lack of craft.”
Just take a moment if you need and reread that to really let it sink in. Study other creators and performers to help inform your technique.
Impact the market to help build the poetry industry
Every industry has a market. And every market is full of buyers and sellers — or in the poetry industry’s case, poets and those who book poets. The struggle with improving the market is the current attitude toward poets that accept money for their poetry.
Pages explains this well, “They’re like, ‘Oh, don’t be the poet that accepts the lower amounts of money from places. That’s messing it up for the rest of us.’ And I was like, messing it up for who? Now that means I have to do the work to present myself and say, “This is why I’m worth this amount.’ That’s on me now. They blame the homie that’s taking less money, saying it’s affecting the market. To the same degree, me taking more money can also affect the market. But my quality of work is above the lesser money.”
A poet accepting money for a gig just grows the market, which creates an industry. So how does this affect Pages’ approach to his poetry career?
Create the infrastructure that will build the industry
The market is important, but it takes more than market value to build the poetry industry. We need infrastructure as well. This is what Pages has to say about that:
“If we want to talk about the market, then we need to talk about how we are creating a system that has some legs, some foundational elements, that has a union, that has a base salary, insurance. That’s the type of stuff I’m on now. The infrastructure part that literally every other system uses.”
If you look at other industries, you’ll find exactly those things: base salaries for different levels of experience, unions, insurance and benefits, etc. We should be working to implement those basics to build our industry. What makes this difficult?
“We want to be so traditionalist,” Pages explains, “and we’re stuck to this underground, real-rap-raw mindset, and there’s a space for that. That can exist. I’m not saying get rid of it. I’m saying adapt and offer different choices, and the ability is right there. We can create actual ways and tangible results that lead to and yield bountiful careers.”
Expand your audience to grow the industry
Beyond market value and infrastructure, there’s the audience. Without an audience, the industry stands still. Going back to studying other poets, we also should study others in the industry who are succeeding. Others who are succeeding are appealing to audiences outside the poetry community. They’re reaching the mainstream public.
Pages brings up Button Poetry as a solid example: “[Button Poetry] is smart enough to recognize the need to get people outside of the poetry community to buy into this so that it can grow into something bigger.”
But why does this work?
“I don’t want to do things for other poets because other poets aren’t paying these bills,” says Pages.
Basically, this works because the poetry community is often the typical starving artist that can’t afford to pay for your craft in full. Plus, the mainstream public is the majority, which means they have a larger influence on the public perception of poetry.
How do you grow that audience, then? Pages says it all comes back to your approach.
“I know a lot of talented people who are not doing anything. I know a lot of people where I’m like, ‘This is terrible, but they’re on top of the world.’ What’s the difference here? A lot of times it’s the factor of your approach to your work.”
Take some time to evaluate how you’re approaching your poetry career and if you’re setting yourself up for success and growth.
We’ll leave you with this final thought from Pages:
“If your approach to the craft and the way that you build your work and your network goes beyond doing things for views and claps, then the people you’re bringing up are going to be okay.”
Meaning, if you approach poetry for more than praise and really focus on building the industry, you’ll set up a path to success for poets after you.
Be sure to listen to the full episode, because this nugget of wisdom barely scratches the surface of what Pages had to share with us. You won’t regret it!
With over a decade of combined experience as an award-winning writer, touring and teaching artist, producer, event coordinator, and host, Pages has garnered both a local and online following, various tv and radio appearances with over a million YouTube views, and many opportunities to perform across the country and different parts of the world, with appearances to audiences as large as 20,000.
