Helen, you wrote....
I don't have a problem with charging people to come to
>poetry workshops, nor with charging them for the labour as well as the
>materials involved in publication costs. Charging a fee for a reading seems
>reasonable. They are all part of the recompense of time with money paradigm.
So is the printed word, the only problem is the relationship between time
spent and money received. Any reading you do presupposes, unless you
improvise, further time spent preparing work to read. If it is already
prepared, printed, published it seems natural to charge as well. The
difficulty is how to scale the charge. In theory if we are to follow your
example to an extreme, the only work it would be ethical to publish would be
limited editions, with the price calculated to bring in what you perceive as
a reasonable hourly rate (leaving aside problems with quantifying the time
spent). At any moment that you decide to take payment for your work, the
possibility arises that work done will not correspond reasonably or
ethically to payment received. Payment means it is product, whatever the
form it takes.
Is this a problem? Whether it is or not, it seems to me that it is almost
impossible to avoid now. The monasteries have all closed. We are all
sullied, and poetry is no exception!...The only way to move is to examine
one's own motives; am I doing it for the money above and beyond reasonable
needs, or is the money simply a necessary barter tool. Trip lightly through
the twilight!
Nick Kearney
[log in to unmask]
Florida Centre de Formacion
Catarroja, Valencia.
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