Is it possible to be a millionaire poet?
Last
week, an amateur poet won more than $1m on a TV talent show in the
United Arab Emirates. But what does an injection of cold hard cash on
this scale do to a poet's creative impulses?
Since February, global audiences of up to 70 million have tuned in to watch Million's Poet, in which men (there were no female contestants this year) in traditional dress take turns to deliver self-penned verses of a type of colloquial Arabic poetry called Nabati. A panel of judges delivers feedback, the Emirati royal family puts in an occasional appearance, and the contestants are gradually whittled down.
If this format seems alien to the business of poetry, described by Wordsworth as "emotion recollected in tranquillity", then the prize money may also give us pause for thought. When 27-year-old Saif al-Mansuri won the sixth season of the show last week, he took home five million UAE Dirhams - that's $1.3m or £800,000. As literary prizes go, the only thing that comes close is the Nobel Prize for Literature, which stands at eight million Swedish kronor ($1.2m or £700,000).
Al-Mansuri's winning poem was called Golden Papers, and it was about his experience on Million's Poet
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Tsead Bruinja Poet"I think it's the idea that truth is where sadness is, where poverty is, where the booze is. And not where the money is.”
"Ordinarily, poetry does seem to
be the opposite of show business, and we probably just prefer our poets
not to be celebrities in that particular way," says Don Share,
Chicago-based editor of Poetry magazine and a poet himself. "It doesn't
sit well with us, and it's very hard to explain that. Money is felt to
be contaminating and to be antithetical to the values that we expect
from poetry and literature and art."
That impression, he says, was fixed by the large number of great poets in history who happened to be very poor.
In the mid-19th Century, visitors flocked to the cottage of John Clare, to stare at the "peasant poet" who lived and worked in grinding poverty. There was bohemian poverty too, the type where a poet's last pennies were spent on absinthe or opium rather than bread. Charles Baudelaire was born to a wealthy family but squandered his inheritance and sank into debt. He said: "Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry." Arthur Rimbaud, living a scandalous life with his lover Paul Verlaine in London in 1872, passed his time in the Reading Room of the British Museum, to use their free heating and ink.
The associations between poverty and poetry did not disappear in the 20th Century. "Like many of my fellow poets, we grew up reading the Beat generation - Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac," says the Friesian poet Tsead Bruinja. "And they were into the hobos, and all that train-hopping stuff. I think it's the idea that truth is where sadness is, where poverty is, where the booze is. And not where the money is."
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Find out more
- BBC Arabic's Dina Demrdash discussed Million's Poet on the Fifth Floor on the BBC World Service
But Bruinja says that he no
longer has such a narrow conception of his art-form, and thinks verse
can be hammered out of all kinds of life experience. "There's poetry
everywhere," he says.
The artists and philosophers of Puccini's La Boheme burn a manuscript by Rudolfo, a poet, to stay warm
The American poet Frederick Seidel is perhaps unique among contemporary English-language poets in his willingness to discuss the trappings of wealth, from fine dining to his love of Ducati motorbikes. He was born into a family that had become wealthy in haulage, and has lived a comfortable life - "I live a life of laziness and luxury" he begins one poem. But his poetry hasn't always been well-received, with one critic calling him a name-dropper.
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O, how I long to be agen
That poor and independent man,
With labour's lot from morn to night
And books to read at candle light;
That followed labour in the field
From light to dark when toil could yield
Real happiness with little gain,
Rich thoughtless health unknown to pain:
Though, leaning on my spade to rest,
I've thought how richer folks were blest
And knew not quiet was the best.
From Approaching Night, by John Clare
That poor and independent man
That poor and independent man,
With labour's lot from morn to night
And books to read at candle light;
That followed labour in the field
From light to dark when toil could yield
Real happiness with little gain,
Rich thoughtless health unknown to pain:
Though, leaning on my spade to rest,
I've thought how richer folks were blest
And knew not quiet was the best.
From Approaching Night, by John Clare
It might also be difficult for
poets to adjust to the new rhythms of life that coming into money
thrusts upon them. A lot of people find that when they have the time to
write they suddenly can't, Palmer says. On the other hand, coming into
money may help a poet. Bruinja says the added attention might mean a
poet's output changes slightly, but he or she can also buy a nice house
and enjoy peace and quiet. Seamus Heaney said that he felt more pressure
after winning the Nobel Prize in 1995, but described his cottage in
Wicklow, Ireland as a "haven".
Don Share says a common experience in the development of a young poet is for someone - a parent or friend, perhaps - to take them aside and warn them that there is no money in what TS Eliot described as the "mug's game" of poetry.
Why is this? Unlike visual artists - who can become very well-off indeed - a poet's product is immaterial, and therefore harder to commodify. Poems can be everywhere at once, and there is a sense in which they belong to anyone that can read, says Share. "What we love about poems is that they become ours. One thing that seems to be very important is for people to feel a poem has a value that is incalculable."
But he also thinks poetry is undervalued because it is not seen as proper work. As the Serbian-American poet Charles Simic once quipped, most poems are too short to be seen as valuable. "They give the impression it took no time to write them. Ten minutes tops. To write a 600-page novel takes years."
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I was promis'd on a time
To have a reason for my rhyme:
From that time unto this season,
I receiv'd nor rhyme nor reason.
A plea for money?
One story relates that a poet, possibly Edmund Spenser, presented this quatrain to Elizabeth I, when he failed to receive a £100 payment he was promised - she got the message and paid him immediately.I was promis'd on a time
To have a reason for my rhyme:
From that time unto this season,
I receiv'd nor rhyme nor reason.
Share relates a recent
conversation amongst his poet friends on Facebook, after one of them was
invited by a neighbour to give a workshop in a school. When the poet
asked if she would be paid, the neighbour was appalled. "The idea was
that she should share her expertise and her work for free, and that it
was outrageous to ask for money in return."
Patronage of the arts has not disappeared from the West, although it tends to operate on a corporate or civic level, rather than a personal one. An exception to this is the "adopt a poet" scheme operated by the Poetry International Foundation. The foundation's director, Bas Kwakman, laments that it is almost impossible to survive as a poet nowadays, but he doesn't begrudge al-Mansuri his $1.3m prize.
"I wouldn't care if he adopts a rapper's style with beautiful cars and expensive sunglasses, driving by the beach with beautiful girls," he says. "Let him be a bigger rapper star. And afterwards, at night, let him write beautiful poetry."
Saif al-Mansuri in the final of Million's Poet
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