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Live at the Café, poetry CD set
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Watch this YouTube video
Live at Waiting4the Bus
in Chicago 05/18/09
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See YouTube video 6/11/17 of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Tapes the Key Hole”, “Evolving, Connecting and Confounding” and “How Much For Your Poem” at Georgetown’s “Poetry Aloud” open mic (Sony).
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See YouTube video 6/11/17 of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Tapes the Key Hole”, “Evolving, Connecting and Confounding” and “How Much For Your Poem” at Georgetown’s “Poetry Aloud” open mic (Lumix).

How Much For Your Poem

I have been pricing these things out:
going to the five and dime,
searching for names
searching for pieces of worth

and the only ones I can find
are the ones by dead people
do you have to be dead to be thought of as good?

and so I’m seeing these books
and they’re all expensive
(for someone who’s been dead)
even at the five and dime
and so I go to the counter
and ask for them for something by someone new

and they give me that blank stare
(that you usually get
when you ask someone what seems to them
like an impossible question,
when to you it seems
obvious and apparent)
and they tell you they have none

and you ask them how much it would cost
to get something different, something new
and they give you that blank stare again
and they say "that stuff doesn’t sell"

well, of course not,
when you never put it on the market,
you think
and you shrug your shoulders
looking at the books by dead people
that you don’t want to buy
as you walk away


Copyright © 2006 Janet Kuypers.

U.S. Government Copyright © 2004
Chicago Poet Janet Kuypers
on all art and all writings on this site completed
before 6/6/04. All rights reserved. No material
may be reprinted without express permission.

the 2007 book Tick Tock, front cover the CD set Live at the Cafe (3 CD set)

my hand to an anim of jkchair