I’ve been thinking a lot about platforms and how artists share their work online and offline. In the past, poets like myself relied on books (or the paper paywall) and performance (the person paywall)to share our work. When the internet intruded on this existence it served as a convenience to bolster the other two. No serious, respected poet was sharing all of their work online. Books and gigs weren’t just a means to an income, they still make the slimmest part of a poet’s revenue, but they were a signifier of prestige and status. You were often implicitly judged on where you were published and/or where you were booked to perform. Prizes also factored into this and still do.

Problems arose when people wanted to read your work but a lot of it was paywalled off in these more traditional media and if you shared work beyond a private social network then it tended to be older, B-tier stuff. Therefore the work that people tended to see first was the work you weren’t too keen to be known by. In the meantime your best work hid in slim volumes, in short runs of magazines or in the low-fidelity memories of those who saw you perform live.