“I’m escorting you off the property,” my liaison informs me, her face flushed with anger.
“Sure, I’ll just grab my bike, and my typewriter,” I tell her. The check for $8,000 is already in my pocket. Coldplay’s Someone Just Like This reverberates through the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in downtown New Orleans, for the fourth time in as many days—the recycled playlist at the Mare Nostrum Conference is how I’ve begun to reckon time’s passage.
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, according to their website. For four days in late October, as autumn finally descends on this particular bend in the Mississippi River, Mare Nostrum presents a dizzying array of what I can only assume are cutting-edge data presentations, punctuated by keynote speakers, one of whom is advertised as a Human Explorer.
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.
*
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—here in New Orleans, and on tour in Paris, Havana, New York, London, San Francisco, Madrid. I use a quasi-Marxist system: strangers give me a topic, and ten minutes later they come back and pay what they feel the poem is worth (a wealthy banker of a sensitive persuasion, startled by a love poem composed for their spouse, might hand me a hundred-dollar bill, and I happily write poems for barefoot customers reeking of malt liquor, for free).
People wandering around private events don’t necessarily desire a poem—but since their host has already paid a flat fee and everything is free, the poems become a privilege to be summoned at will.Although street-poets are now common in cities around the world, I’ve published work in newspapers like The Times of London and El Mundo; because of this publicity, or perhaps because I secured the poetforhire.org domain, I’ve started receiving occasional requests to perform this experimental poetics at festivals, weddings, and corporate events.
People wandering around private events don’t necessarily desire a poem—but since their host has already paid a flat fee and everything is free, the poems become a privilege to be summoned at will, like proffered trays of bacon-wrapped dates impaled upon a toothpick. In these situations, the poems, too, become a form of amuse-bouche. A harmless, aesthetically-pleasing souvenir. I’m not crazy about private events—I would much rather write memento mori than mementos—but the quick influx of cash helps my financially precarious lifestyle stay afloat.
*
According to my agent, who I began working with to handle these queries, someone from the events company decided that a phalanx of typewriter street-poets would be a fresh, innovative way to infuse the conference with something other than 1s and 0s. And to give attendees something to do between meals and keynote addresses about Human-Exploring. Conference organizers also set up a simulacrum of a second line parade, complete with police on motorcycles, a baton-twirling dance crew, and a float with bead-hurling executives wearing branded t-shirts and Eyes Wide Shut masks from Party Supply. Barrels of Hurricane cocktail mix manifest out of thin air.
A thirty-foot statue of a grinning Louis Armstrong is wheeled around in figure-eights like an antediluvian god. For anyone who has attended the phantasmagoria of Mardi Gras, the conference opening ceremony feels as if someone who’s never been to New Orleans, yet has plentiful access to Wikipedia, has been given half a million dollars to recreate a G-rated twenty minutes of Carnival, the carne vale, the farewell to the flesh.
Second line parading is a tradition created and kept alive by Black New Orleans social-aid societies to sustain their communities and traditions, in a place where they have been enslaved, murdered, incarcerated, and systematically oppressed for centuries. Any given Sunday, a second line marches through neighborhoods like Central City and Treme, either in celebration of joy, or to mourn the passing of a beloved community member. That a second line would be used to titillate largely white corporate management is an irony I fear is lost on many.
*
“We also have a graffiti artist,” my liaison tells me, while giving me a walk-through, the morning of the opening day. “She might be from the Bay Area? I think she’s famous.”
“What’s her name?”
“Oh, I can’t recall, there’s been so much to put together for this week,” she says, and I believe her. Leading me into the Data Village, we pass an orchard of gigantic multicolored spheres suspended in the air as if by magic, which would be Seussian if they weren’t emblazoned with hashtags.
*
If you think $8,000 is a lavish sum to pay four poets for nineteen hours of work, you’d be wrong only in the sense that the scale of an event like Mare Nostrum is so massive that value itself begins to become relative. To arrive at our “Data Poetry” site, we navigate an area larger than a busy international airport.
Bright primary-color playgrounds populate the Data Village, complete with see-saws and swings for selfie-ing, multiple delis stocked with snacks, constellations of coffee and tea-stations attended by flocks of tuxedo-shirt-clad caterers catering to every whim. There are bean-bag chill-zones, yoga studios, and a Mare Nostrum-brand clothing store, interspersed with exhibitors hocking their data-wares, all of it flanked on all sides by projection screens looming many times higher than my shotgun house.
*
Seventeen-thousand attendees is a hell of a lot. A line of twenty people pecking at luminous tablets snakes out from our table. My pants are soaked from biking here in the rain at 6am—our shift begins at seven. My comrades and I (Joseph Makkos, a Dadaism scholar, letterpress printer, and archivist of tens of thousands of Times Picayune newspapers—Tania Panés, a globe-trotting, tri-lingual, award-winning novelist from Madrid—and Cubs the Poet, a hip-hop inflected Instagram phenom) stop in at Leni’s diner on Baronne Street for grits and eggs, one of the few businesses open at this hour that’s not a bar. After the drenched bike ride, I fortify my coffee with a drop of whiskey from my hip flask. Jo snaps a photo, texts it to me.
If you think $8,000 is a lavish sum to pay four poets for nineteen hours of work, you’d be wrong only in the sense that the scale of an event like Mare Nostrum is so massive that value itself begins to become relative.Later that morning, I post it on my Instagram, and within a few hours our liaison reaches out to inform me politely that I must scrub my social media of any reference to the conference. It’s very important to Mare Nostrum to control their image, she tells me, as if Mare Nostrum is the name of an insecure tween, and not a gathering of the consiglieres of billionaires who annually construct a city within a city to celebrate themselves, while plotting how to use Big Data to bend civilization to their whim, and monetize it in the process.
We set up our typewriters in an immaculate theatre stage-set that has been built just for us. The architecture is reminiscent of minimalist design that evokes place without visually obscuring the actors—the interlocking angles of our “building” suggest a roof, without need of an actual roof, windows without actual windows. I’ve worked in the theatre before, and our set is slicker than most professional theatre sets I’ve seen. If you told me our set alone had a budget of $35,000, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. Here’s the thing: the stage set is completely unnecessary. We could just as easily use a single folding table, the kind covered in newspapers, where pots of boiled crawfish are poured out all summer in backyards around the city.
*
The days blur one into the next. I’ve worked busy events before, but Mare Nostrum is unrelenting, perhaps because of the absurdly early shifts. On the third morning, I open my typewriter case at 6:45am, with three customers already queued up in front of me. They hang around like stray junkies, long after we pack up. I ask our liaison if we can print out a piece of paper with our schedule on it, so people won’t stand around waiting, and she texts back, Sorry, they can’t have that. Mare Nostrum wants to maintain the aesthetic.
We practice our own aesthetics. There’s no time to read each other’s work, but in my periphery I see that Cubs has adopted Rupi Kaur’s process of illustrating poems with dreamlike cartoons. Joseph dabbles in Concrete Poetry, an unapologetically avant-garde visual style, especially when a customer insists on a vague topic like Friendship, or My Cat. Tania, too, explores a visual direction, her poems redolent with Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrams, verses sprawling across the page in the shape of whatever subject she’s given.
I stick to alternating indentations, just enough form to provide a semblance of structure, so the reader trusts me—before leaning heavily into politics. Despite W.H. Auden’s assertion that Poetry makes nothing happen, I believe Bertolt Brecht when he says Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.
*
“I’d like my poem to be about, ‘How to help people’—it’s for my boss,” a cheery young woman tells me, an hour before we close up shop on the final day of the conference. This assignment moves me profoundly—after a thousand poems about anniversaries and dense explications of maverick approaches to data analysis, someone seems sincerely interested in the human condition—an embodiment of the benevolent side of the tech industry. Despite my rage at companies like Facebook for their complicity in the election of a psychopathic demagogue, among many other sins—Silicon Valley aspires to a fervent streak of altruism that falls squarely into the tradition of idealism going back to the 1800s.
The subject for her poem is a question philosophers have wrestled with for centuries, leading to Marx’s indictment of capitalism as a virus which will ultimately eat itself, unless it’s eradicated by a system which doesn’t require exponential profit at the expense of workers and the environment. I don’t say any of this, because not even Marxists enjoy the mansplaining of Marx—instead, I say, “That’s so beautiful, it makes me think of the roots of idealism.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of customer engagement. Like, ‘How can we help our customer engage more with our product and our content?’” she informs me. Oy.
“Ah, of course. I’ll see what I can do. Come back in five or ten minutes,” I tell her, and she disappears into the crowd. The distinction she’s drawn between customers and people is subtle but seems like a natural entry point into the poem. I hammer out, HOW TO HELP PEOPLE for the title, then The customers are always people/but the people aren’t always customers—and then struggle to hear the next lines forming over the Maroon 5 club-banger echoing through this weird corporate canyon.
On the third morning, I open my typewriter case at 6:45am, with three customers already queued up in front of me.I think of the Foxconn suicides in China, nets installed around factories to catch workers driven to suicide by the endless manufacture of iPhone components. I’ve written about them before, but now, perhaps because of the Convention Center’s Big Top atmosphere, I think of the safety netting in circuses. My fingers hover over the typewriter, a blur of potential ideas flickering through me: the Facebook thumbs-up symbol evoking Roman emperors deciding which gladiators will live and die; Don’t be evil, Google’s motto, until their investors scrubbed it from their website; Move fast and break things, another redacted aphorism, this time from Facebook, channeling Sun Tzu’s The Art of War; Work hard, says Amazon, a particularly Orwellian admonition from a company that forces its workers to pee into bottles…
I glance up, and thirty people standing in line sense my movement, looking up from their phones to see if I’m done yet—Just write the poem already, their expressions seem to say. With so many different ideas clacking around in my skull, I decide to simplify things by plagiarizing myself, and type up a combination of the two pieces I’ve already published. A Franken-poem of sorts, with new imagery thrown in:
How to Help People
The customers are always people,
but people aren’t always customers—
What about the lithium miners impaled
upon their machines in the salt flats?
What about the children suiciding themselves
out the iPhone factory windows in China,
who the bosses engage with nets to catch them
like so many wee acrobats of a circus
in which we are all emperors,
brandishing our thumbs up or down?
“It’s intense, but I had to keep it real,” I tell her when she comes back. As she reads it, she laughs nervously. “Nothing to do but laugh about it, right? That’s real, you know, the nets and all that,” I say. She seems sincerely moved and thanks me, before wandering off to go rock climbing or play foosball.
By the end of each shift, we all feel like robots—poetry-automatons pumping out verse after verse, our corner of the Village clattering with our quartet of percussion, keys and carriages sweeping and margin bells dinging. Joseph, who was invited to Café Voltaire in Zurich to perform as part of the 100th anniversary of Dadaism, jokes everyday about defacing our own stage set, and changing the bright ochre words from DATA POETRY to DADA POETRY.
“An act of self-graffiti!” he says gleefully.
“Je m’enfoutisme,” says Tania, looking up from the carriage of her Royal.
“Quoi?”
“I-don’t-give-a-damn-ism,” Jo says, and something about how he assures us that we shouldn’t act afraid, or sentimental, but like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, preparing the great spectacle of Capitalism’s disaster.
These days, the Dadaists usually get clumped together with the Surrealists, if they come up at all. Though often reduced to nothing more than oddly dressed absurdists, Tristan Tzara and the Dadaists were bent on waging an insurgent cultural campaign of anti-art. Even the genesis of the movement’s name is militant—a knife stabbed into a dictionary at random, landing on Dada, the French word for hobbyhorse. Their bizarre poems and art were part of an explicitly anti-colonialist attempt to provoke the bourgeoise into destroying Capitalism, beginning with the false rationalism it depends upon. If the bodies stacking up in heaps in WWI could be rational, well, the Dadaists would stop making sense.
“I love it when you call me Big Da-da/throw yo hands in the air, if youse a true playa” Cubs raps over our dissonant rhythm of keys. Dadaism may have used nonsense to fight injustice, but I can’t resist the urge to tell my customers exactly what I think they most need to hear.
*
In the last minutes of the last shift on the last day of the conference, our liaison stops by as we’re packing up, and a new line of eager poetry-seekers starts to queue up behind her.
“Sorry folks, the poets are leaving,” she tells them. Something sounds different in her voice. I’ve only seen her once during the past four days, and I can’t help but wonder—if we didn’t show up at all, would anyone have noticed? I hand off my last poem, and as soon as the customer is out of earshot, our liaison snaps, “Ben, we need to speak in private, immediately.”
I assume she’s peeved about my Instagram post, which besides documenting my drinking of liquor at 6:15am, pokes fun at the absurd 58-degree air-conditioning and constant Maroon 5 soundtrack. Instead, she’s apoplectic.
“How dare you. What on earth are you thinking? You wrote a poem about suicide? You will never work another conference again, I’ll see to that personally.”
“I write about whatever people ask me to—”
“She asked you to write about making customers happy,” she says, and shows me a photo of the poem on her phone, holds it close to her chest and flashes it to me briefly, as if it’s a particularly nasty dick-pic she doesn’t want to be caught with.
“She asked me to write a poem about how to make people happy, not customers. That’s the whole point. She seemed to like it—”
“She works for Apple! It was a present for her team leader! He is extremely upset, and complained to Mare Nostrum, and now Mare Nostrum is extremely upset. Apple is a major sponsor. This is an embarrassment for everyone, including me.”
“Ah. I didn’t realize she worked for Apple—I wouldn’t have used the word ‘iPhone’ if I had known that. But this is the artist’s role in society, to speak about what no one else will—”
“You were hired to make people happy, not to make our sponsors angry!”
“I understand the anger, and I’m sorry this whole thing happened, but that’s what the poem is about—where’s the empathy, where’s the anger for the people who died in the factories—”
“Who cares about those people! Look, we have a contract, and we’ll honor it. Although, I cannot believe I have to pay you after what you’ve done. Here’s your check. I’m escorting you off the property.”
*
As we pass the balls bobbing in their Seussian anti-gravity, a woman rushes into our path, gushing about poetry. “It was the best part of the conference! I mean, Mare Nostrum is always great, but I’ve just never seen anything like you before! I don’t know how you do it. I’m framing the poem, thank you so, so much,” she says. Our liaison, hard on my heels as we make our way to the exit, to sunshine and fresh air, watches me leave, the scowl never leaving her face.
*
After the check clears, I send my agent this essay, giddy. She writes back, Ben u do realize that she might have got fired don’t u. Someone had to go down for this. Glad it wasn’t u, but. Ya. Don’t bite the hand.
An aftershock of empathy washes over me, a flood carrying particles of guilt like silt. My own mother was not much older than the liaison when she died—technically, of a stroke. Though, her brain exploding was incidental, as she’d been drinking suicidally for months, after being sacked from her job of twenty-five years. The first domino. Next, the bank took the house. Losing the job she loved, a job she excelled at, sent her careening down a path of alcoholism and humiliation at a velocity that proved terminal.
The liaison—a sobriquet contrived to hide her identity, which strips her of humanity. Reduces her to inanimate noun. She’s a pawn in a hegemonic game of chess, yes, but she’s also my mother. She’s everyone’s mother, and I’m a pawn too, using Apple products to write this essay—could I have cut her down en passant? Just passing through—
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Je m’enfoutisme’s revolution operates in the absence of empathy. Dada’s dagger slices both ways—I wonder what word was on the other side of the dictionary page they gored while bored in that Zurich café, disgusted and raging at the war, safe and sound in the neutral higher ground…
