Jackson McCarthy (he/him)
One of the first times I had my poetry published, I was paid seventy dollars. Corey asked me what that would work out to, exactly, as an hourly wage. We were probably seventeen; Corey had just started working at the school tuck shop; other boys in our class were opening Sharesies accounts and micro-trading stocks. We were all becoming very interested in money. How exactly would that seventy dollars work out? I’d written the poems over the course of months; they were, to me, intense records of my life and thinking. The poems underwent stages of writing and rewriting, drafting and redrafting: from the whole concept (I at one point had the rather obvious idea of calling the work Love Poem as Elegy) to the form (another working title was Sonnet with Messy Hair) to the rhymes, metrics, and syntax. I’d work wherever; I’d polish lines on my phone, taking the train home; I’d find new lines coming to me seemingly at random; I kept a notebook, too, full of phrases, both mine and others’, that excited me; I’d send the poems to friends for their impressions; and, of course, there were times I spent staring, as most people imagine writers staring, at a blank white page, my cursor blinking.
An important aspect of the writer’s life, I realised, was that it was inextricable from their work. It was absurd to think of my seventy dollars in hourly terms. As a writer, I was always at work; I never clocked out. For a number of months, while I lived life, went to school, fell for a boy who paid me no attention, ate, shit, and slept, somewhere in my mind these poems, my spells, were brewing; somewhere, somehow, I was working. And yet, my work looked a lot like play. While my parents worked all day to put food on our table and pay our bills, could I really call what I was doing ‘work’?; especially when I hoped for the opposite: that my poems wouldn’t feel like ‘work’ to read, that they wouldn’t bear the scars of all that drafting, at all?
It’s too easy to retreat into cliche; don’t worry, you won’t find me rhapsodising about how ‘urgent’ or ‘neccessary’ my own poetry is. Art might in fact not be urgent or necessary, might not be prioritised or properly valued, in our world. The labour of artists might not, under Neoliberalism, stand up next to the kinds of wage-labour that bring people safety and security. But art doesn’t happen because somebody thought it financially viable: there’s no investor, no board, no manager demanding anybody make art. In the bombed cities, the wasted homes, the dishevelled places, poems are still being written; poems are still being written in Gaza.
And so one of the reasons that art remains radical is that its existence alone suggests, or even speaks into reality, however briefly, an alternative system of value; a system of value other than that of money. The dollar crushes the broad spectrum of human experience into a harsh, crass
materialism, as though everything were comparable — the ‘usefulness’, then, of an artist’s labour, might lie precisely in its supposed ‘uselessness’: its integration of work and leisure remains illegible in a world of markets.
All of this is to say that I was grateful to receive that seventy dollars. I felt like a real poet; I was over the moon. Pay your artists, people! But that, strangely enough, that seventy dollars only served to deepen my sense of the gap between the kind of work that art requires and the kind of compensation money can offer for it. While the marginality of artists in the public eye (and particularly in this government’s eye) continues to disappoint, working as an artist reminds you that our purpose was never to integrate into a preconceived notion of what’s ‘work’ and what’s ‘leisure’. Rather, it’s always been to imagine, to feel out and create, an alternative; to point out the times in our lives (when in love, at rest, deep in thought, grief-stricken) when a monetary system of value begins to lose supremacy.