Spoke tonight to Josh Weber's Introduction to Creative Writing course (who meets in the building! tres convenient..) and gave a brief introduction to poetry - his students had been working on fiction for the last 6 weeks or so, so I discussed poetry in terms of how it is similar and dissimilar from poetry. I took a poll of the 10 (?) or so students and only 3 out of 10 write and read poetry, though their tastes were eclectic ranging from traditional folk/ethnic poetry to Rexroth and modern American poets. The rest of the 7 hadn't really read poetry since high school citing "not as accessible as prose" and "difficult". Hmmmm. I talked about writers who have a foot in both worlds - Michael Ondaatje, Li Young Lee, Julia Alvaraz and than moved towards talking in brief about some of the considerations in writing poetry. We looked at examples of contemporary poetry by living writers including work from RISE by A. Van Jordan, Andrew Schelling's ROAD TO OCOSINGO, Arthur Sze's ARCHIPELAGO, and my own EQUIVALENCE. Than I brought them downstairs to look at visual and concrete poetry on the walls of my gallery. Not too many folks read the artist's statement, even though I blew it up to a 16 point font and it is very readable now. Folks lingered over Ferenc's photos and got very excited about my word pieces "last one picked", "dodgeball" and "offensive play". Two of the women in the class got hung up on offensive play and started looking for graphic representations hidden in the work. I hope that in the end, I gave the students a sense of the diversity of poetry out there and what's possible - it ain't all Billy Collins and Mary Oliver and you don't have to be a self-identifying "poet" to brave the poetic form - what's up with the whole fiction/poetry division which dates back to grad school - as long as you have a love for language, there is hope for poetry! I watched several visitors picked up freebie publications on the floor of my gallery and a couple lingered over the publications that were marked with prices. Selling publications in the gallery is a little bit of a thought experiment. On one hand, I definitely want to be able to and do give things away, and often - the whole gift economy and here's a sample of my work please enjoy it and thank you for your interest- but on the other hand - people like to walk away with something free in most situations (I am reminded of a story my friend Lucy's husband told me about free bus transfers in New York and how people took them if they didn't need a transfer, and there was this one street corner where people would dispose of these transfers and if you were looking for a transfer, short on change, you could just go check out this corner and find one inevitably....), and I want people who are genuinely interested in the work to pick it up and read it, so I came up with a price list for various publications/pieces and am testing it out. Well it went better than I thought it would - one student's eye fell upon American Zen: A Gathering of Poets and he snapped it up at the $15.00 cover price. "What's that?" he pointed. We had just been having a conversation about Rexroth too. It was quite exciting. It's a weird feeling, selling and pricing one's work. I'm hoping to move some copies of Equivalence thru the gallery as well. It will be VERY interesting if I ever get my act together to mount a show of my photographs in this space. The first time I showed a piece, "Chozubachi" (the frontispiece for EQUIVALENCE) in Chicago, I purposely priced the work high, not really wanting to let it go, and than there are artists who mark things "NFS" - not for sale. But it would be interesting to see what sort of interest is aroused by my photographic work... another aside on the business of selling books - I've noticed that when reading venues charge admission, the audience is much less inclined to purchase books. I'm not sure I believe in charging admission or "suggested donations" for poetry events, unless they are specific fundraisers that go to benefit a press or some other worthwhile cause. When I used to go to Blacksmith House events or Grolier events in Cambridge, I often felt they had low numbers due to their admission price. You could go down the street to Harvard University or Wordsworth and catch a reading by any number of fabulous writers. Hmmm, the life of the poet, stimulating stuff.