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.

Poems are words. But they are also so much more than mere words at the same time. They are sentences, but simple sentences do not make prose. They rhyme, but rhyming is not the end all be all of poetry.

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.

Money is going to be an issue. Yes, its true that some people want their artists to be pure, to be untouched by the realities of money. But artists do not live in a vacuum. They need to eat, to pay rent, to pay utilities. So they are going to need their the money from the commission, because that is what a commission is. Its an exchange of money for services.

But of course, the poet should be skilled. Any person with basic linguistic skills can put words together to form a sentence. They can then put those sentences together to form a verse. But that does not mean that the verse produced will be good. It just means that it will be there. Then again, artistic talent is subjective, so maybe samples should be examined before hiring anyone.

The world is something that can be made beautiful. But that beauty comes at a cost. Some people can create, can make things pretty. But the people who cannot can hire those from the first group. It can cost a little bit of money, it can take a little bit of time, but it can be done, and it can be done well.




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