Between art and money: The social space of public readings in contemporary poetry economies and careers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".