Why not organic poetry with artisanal salt? Where does creation and the superstructure of Arts? Canada Council says “Together we bring the arts to life” and in The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Robin Wall Kimmerer says we need to stop modelling from default scarcity and instead to default abundance and a gift culture of connection and gratitude.
In The Marketplace ™ how does the individual citizen fit? Not the consumer, not the artist, but the person inside the machinery?
There is attention on needs of formal structures; festivals, reading series programs, social media, granting bodies, professional writers organizations. This is all made as a mechanism to reach outside the immediate 2 or 5 people a life has room for.
These complex social tools are all designed to support the individual who wants to meet the individual through the medium of a page, digital or paper.
These support structures facilitate trade of A, your ideas, for B, goods/cash. And to reach the group of 200 or so that we can keep in our heads as “ours”. (And next, world domination.)
If we live among people who are in a self-sustaining sufficient closed community, we don’t need to access the superstructure.
It’s superfluous. You don’t have energy to cast about when there’s soil to be tended. Besides, I like what you do which I can’t do well, and you like what I do that you can’t do like I can. We are both satisfied. This makes all the rest unnecessary.
If we want more?
Our human population is absurdly large and writers and readers can be in insulated isolated pockets. What is exactly your wavelength of tickle might be hard to find.
That’s okay, we have, oh, publishers, reviewers, marketers, networking, presentation forums. An attempt at centralized market so there isn’t so much duplication of labour so we can spend less time looking, more time consuming or creating.
If you sell carrots and I sell carrots, why should we each go door-to-door? It would be mutually beneficial to share knowledge and resources.
A bunch of the carrot growers talk, agree to meet at noon in the square and people learn to come there to haggle for carrots. It’s cooperation more than competition. By being together, people know where the carrots are all at. Some carrot-chucker doesn’t allow a parsnip grower? Fine they go to another corner at 10am. Soon there are a lot of booths.
A person who doesn’t like growing carrots and isn’t good at it but like carrots just fine decides the community needs someone like themself. A middleman decides they can streamline and make the growers life more efficient at doing what they do best. The middleman will handle the markets, signs, word of mouth, even pick up the carrots and handle the money. Carrot growers just grow things. Everyone gets to specialize. It will be easier for growers and eaters.
Now we have these structures but once they have life, they want to self-perpetuate. They need carrots for their truck fleet taking carrots to the network of freezers, and restaurants and dog food factories and export contracts. It all gets complex. It is a perpetual motion machine, a process of product and production. Some people show up every week expecting to buy whatever is for sale and are disgruntled at what gets delivered or become armchair critics but not producers. Others are just happy to enjoy what is grown.
There’s a lot of noise and someone starts a news sheet reporting on the people who sell carrots instead of the carrots. It’s fine. Things start getting a little peripheral as center as people start trading photos of people who give ribbons to their favourite carrots marketers and carrot bag designs. It’s fine. It’s still about eating, right?
Not many customers are going to drive around on the chance occurrence of seeing carrots or parsnips when they are being harvested. They’re too busy tending to their own life of widgets.
True carrot aficionados are few but will track when and with whom to look, but most of the public want a bit of root for the stew now and then.
Only carrot growers with huge egos want a monopoly of everyone buying their carrots. Who wants to industrial scale grow that many carrots?
Is it about supplying demand or love of the next particular carrot and feeding the community that feeds you?
The core moment of nurturing a seed to nourish the self and other bodies can get lost.
It is all predicated on one person and their seeds. One moment in a chain of moments and not buggering off to twitter to argue about sports tracks and trivets, and assume that carrots grow themselves.
Social media can become white noise of hooks clanging. Each title and sentence can get relegated to the art of snagging. Reductionism and headlines and pull out quotes, headshots and packaging, ideal consumer and awards culture, that is all under the purview of market.
Richness of soil, cultivation in private, nurturing what is worthwhile is the job of the farmers.
Catching the market isn’t the work of the field or the seed. Being well formed or sexy or the right orange doesn’t matter to the hungry belly. Those are concerns of middlemen. Their busking may raise consciousness that you can eat something other than potatoes, but the real connection is teeth around what you grew.
The work of the work is the essential bit. Without it, the rest has no purpose.
The social media, the reading tours, the articles, are all beside the root point. What is that truth? That obsession? That underground life that can bring its nutrients?
The satisfying appetite or hunger happens one-to-one.
How to find the one that wants your carrot in particular while you are growing more carrots? Maybe it is naïve but it is not your job.
You learn the best practices, the principles, work from where you are and the carrot grows itself where you put it. Don’t let it die. Don’t let it grow woody, hollow, ginormous and bitter. Keep its seeds and replant the best of what grew.
You hustle when it is the season, or else you partner with a middleman with hustle game, someone who can move among all the hungry people you’d rather not see as you stand in your patch of sun and rain. You plan. You feed your soil. You rest when you can. You keep yourself and your plants healthy.
And that’s that, except where it isn’t.
We need the whole society. We do not live in the confines of what we make. Or what we want. There is the stuff around and what doesn’t fit is sometimes the most interesting bits.
What kind of life do we/you want to make? Wha gives energy and what takes? Maybe you love the market to offset the solitude of growing your ideas.
In From Desire Without Expectation (which I’ve re-read a few times) (above/ground, 2024) Jacob Wren says “My intention here isn’t to celebrate my own partial ignorance. It’s rather to continue learning and include the reader in the process.” He talks of money vs. creation.
Over at Periodicities, Aaron Boothby considers the genesis of a poem, “what calls to us? I think that’s how a poem begins, and informs the whole rest of whatever it becomes.” And not only what a poem becomes, I’d add, but what we become, made by what we attend to and create.