Rhyme pays

>>Local poet actually earns
a living selling her work

by CHRIS BARRY

Name: Kathryn Hogan

Age: 20

Occupation: Poet

Bio: This perky Plateau wordsmith first arrived in Montreal from her native Calgary some two years ago to study creative writing at Concordia. A smart, arty chick who paints and plays piano to boot, Kathryn says she only really got into poetry after being exposed to the work of Charles Bukowski in Grade 11, back when she was a humble exchange student in Frankfurt, Germany. This past spring, upon completing her winter semester at Concordia and finding herself in the dreadfully inhumane position of “having to find a job and work,” Kathryn awoke one morning with the brainstorm “that maybe I could just sell my poems on the street for a dollar instead. I finally realized what Gandhi’s phrase, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world,’ means. I recognized that if one is to try and live their life as poetically as possible, then you can’t work a job that relies on people not living poetically but instead relies on their trying to fill the holes in their lives with consumerism—which ultimately just oils the wheels of a corrupt society.”

Where she hawks her rhymes: On Prince Arthur at de Bullion. “I like that corner because my friend lives right there and she feeds me lunch. I also do Sundays at the Tam Tam jams, which pretty well covers my rent.”

How she gets people to fork over a loonie for some photocopied poem, albeit one that’s on coloured paper: “Well, you know, I’m a competitive spoken word artist, I do slam poetry after all, a format with no props or costumes where the maximum poem length is three minutes. So I’ve got all these short, high-energy pieces, these really polished crowd-pleasers I throw out where these people, they’re all, like, ‘Oh my God, let me buy it’ afterwards. The other thing is, you want to make eye contact with people while they’re walking towards you from, say, 30 metres or so. You need to burst their protective bubbles early, giving them enough time to get used to the concept that their bubble has been broken so they’re more receptive when you address them with your poem. But believe me, breaking down people’s bubbles all day is exhausting.”

Has anyone ever come back to her days later, deciding her poetry sucks, demanding their money back? Yes. “In fact, just yesterday, this girl came up and started yelling at me, shouting that the poem I’d sold her for a dollar a few days earlier ‘wasn’t a poem.’ And she kept it up for, like, five minutes too. I guess some people have very limited ideas of what poetry is and what it can be, you know?”

The volume of poetry Kathryn sells on an average day: “I generally make between $10 and $30 an hour, depending on a few factors, like what time of day it is, if it’s sunny outside, and, uh, (laughing) how many coffees I’ve had to drink that day.”

Three poets she admires: Local boy Chris Masson, Spencer Butt, Michelle Dabrowski.

Musical preferences: Beach Boys, Modest Mouse, CocoRosie.

Last book read: Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut.

Words of wisdom: “Re-examine all that you’ve been told and dismiss everything that offends your soul.”

Comments: dimwit@hdot.net