Saturday, July 21, 2018

The Finer Points Of A Poem Commission

By Timothy Allen


There are certain things that make life a little bit sweeter. Music, art, literature. All of them are called the humanities because they are the foundation of what it means to be human. True, they are not necessary for living. But they do make living a little bit better. But not everyone has the skill for it. Everyone has to capacity to enjoy it, but not necessarily the capacity to create it. So they can them try a poem commission.

A poem is a series of words. But it is also so much more than that. The words at the end are supposed rhyme, but they do not always have to. The main thrust is the length and the emotion behind the words. They have to pack punch, they must go right through the core of the reader or the listener. They cannot just fall on unseeing eyes or deaf ears. They have to stick. They cannot just bounce off.

A commission is a job. Its when a person who does not have an artistic inclination agrees to pay a fee to someone who does. The money is the main variable. In effect, its an economic transaction.

Art is commissioned for numerous reasons. In the olden days, the great masters of the Renaissance were commissioned to create portraits of their patrons. This was done because the patrons were brought up their whole lives to be rich and noble, to do things that aristocrats did, not to be as lowly as an artisan. So they had no talent for it.

Poems have a lot of purpose. But they are mainly there for prose, the prose that helps moves hearts and minds. There main use is to be heard, read, and then analyzed at length by graduate students.

Poets should not be hard to come by. They should be easily found in many an open mic night. They can also be found in campuses. The easiest place to find someone is and, until something better comes along, always will be the internet. They will often post their work online where they can be experienced.

There is such a thing as the starving artist. But no one wants to be that. When someone creates something, some form of work, they want to be paid for it. Now, a commission is explicitly about payment. A client hires someone to create something in exchange for a monetary fee. This fee can vary based on a number of factors. Chief among them will be the level of experience.

Now, the most important factor when finding a poet is the overall skill. Anyone with a dictionary can put a bunch of words together, can put together a bunch of sentences. But not everyone can create prose, and it is this prose that is the lifeblood of the poem. A good way to check this is to simply get some writing samples, as some poets are going to have some of their works ready as samples.

The reality of the world is that it is not pretty. It is ugly, it is cruel, and it is wild. But not always. There are times when can be so beautiful that a person can be driven to tears.




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