Making a Living as a Poet-for-Hire in New Orleans

Benjamin Aleshire was (and is!) a poet-for-hire at a New Orleans technology conference "called" "Mare Nostrum"; and he lived to tell the tale for Lit Hub. "Mare Nostrum—a name I’ve invented to avoid defamation lawsuits—is a symposium on data analytics, a gathering of 17,000 techies who want to Experience the contagious atmosphere created by a culture that doesn’t just love the power of data–they live it," writes Aleshire. More:

Honestly, I never quite knew what Mare Nostrum was about, and still don’t. I’m a poet. I was hired by an intermediary, a “boutique” event-management company, which produces over four thousand events per year on every continent. They tapped me to assemble a dream-team of local poets, to spontaneously compose verse on typewriters for conference attendees—a service for which they would remunerate us handsomely.

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Making a living as a poet-for-hire with a typewriter has been a tradition in New Orleans for decades, though usually I ply my trade plein-air—setting up a folding table on Royal Street in the French Quarter. My street-office coexists alongside painters hanging their canvases on the St. Louis Cathedral gates, brass bands wailing “St. James Infirmary,” children tap-dancing with bottlecaps on the soles of their shoes, human statues and sex workers and fortune tellers. I’m part of the surreal ecosystem of artists and hustlers who populate the Vieux Carré, a neighborhood brimming with wealthy tourists, and almost entirely devoid of residents. In the past year, typewriter-poets have proliferated exponentially. Today, you might find 15 poets of widely varying quality, sobriety, and intention working simultaneously, on Royal Street in the daytime, and Frenchmen Street after nightfall.

I’ve made my living this way for eight years...

Read on at Lit Hub.