Poetry is Not a Public Good

While I’ve been preparing for Flux’s next open mic (this Thursday at 8 pm in Brooks hall!!), I’ve been thinking about how poetry is not actually a public good. It’s usually nonrivalrous, as my enjoyment of a poem about tide to-go sticks does not in anyway limit your enjoyment of the same metaphor. However, any good open mic is excludable. This was best seen at the College Union Slam Invitational 2017, when the “founder of slam poetry” Marc Smith was booed off a stage for his performance of a particularly tasteless poem, Old White Guy Whitey. 

Unlike other more traditional poetry venues, property rights are clearly defined in an open mic space: they belong to the audience. At Flux events, the executive board acts as a governing body in that we let the audience know at the beginning of every event that they are not required to tolerate any sort of hate speech. In this scenario, the CUPSI crowd did not attempt to achieve a Coasian solution to this negative externality. Instead, after Smith was kicked off the stage, the audience proceeded to also demand a new host. The remaining competing teams then required that the rest of the competition would not be filmed, which only furthered to increase the excludability, as those (like myself) watching online from home were unable to see any of the poems that made it to the final stage that year.