Between art and money: The social space of public readings in contemporary poetry economies and careers

What roles do public poetry performances (i.e., ‘readings’) play in contemporary fields of poetry production? Drawing from extensive ethnographic, survey, and interview data gathered in Paris, New York, and Toronto, we explore the social dynamics of readings in order to understand better how these public and social gatherings contribute to poetry economies and careers. While differences exist between the locations for our research, the similarities are striking: we find that readings are crucial to poetry economies because they foster and maintain distribution networks for contemporary poetry in a global marketplace that tends to ‘squeeze out’ forms of art that lack broad commercial appeal. We also find, across these locations, that readings are used in different ways by poets at different stages of career (i.e., unestablished, established, and well-established) and by poets operating in different genres (i.e., those writing ‘for the stage’ versus those writing ‘for the page’). Finally, we emphasize that readings provide an important space in which poets and others (e.g., booksellers, publishers) navigate the difficulties of making art while dealing with the necessities of money.