Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.

This is the weekend most New Yorkers are celebrating as Halloween, and I think it’s important to brace yourself for that! Don’t spend your Friday night on a screen if you can help it. Skip ahead to the List of Clubs for notes on a couple of interesting goings-on, and otherwise, let’s get right into this.

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Made With Intent

I had the fortune to find myself at a prose reading last night in New York’s Chinatown, which brought back several core memories. When I first moved to the city in 2010, I went to lots of concerts and lots of dance parties, naturally. But I also went to more than a few poetry readings. 

At first, that was part of having the fortune to share my first apartment with two Columbia MFA students. They would host public poetry readings for classmates and visiting writers, and so I naturally fell into a cycle of quaint wine bars and rowdy afterparties. My main task, at those afterparties, was to make friends while keeping my turntable from getting too damaged by eager guests in our cramped Williamsburg space. 

It was a surprisingly unpretentious crowd, and I still catch up with people from that world now and then, even today. Part of the approachability was undoubtedly because these people were enormous nerds who were totally submerged in their studies. And it left a lasting impact on me.

My intrigue with the poetry world is in part because I love language, and in part because a writer has to be all-in on creating for its own sake to really deeply love poetry as a craft. 

Unlike the music industry, nobody gets into the poetry world with ambitions to be the next Lana Del Rey.

Books may not make the money they once did, but it’s fully possible to have a career as an author. And yet, being a bestselling poet is extremely rare. Sure, there’s Rupi Kaur. Now, try to name one more who has achieved mainstream stardom in the last 15 years.

What does a creative space that hasn’t been monetized to death even look like, in 2024?

To the best of my knowledge, there is no tech force in the poetry world that has an effect comparable to, say, Spotify. Even if you’re getting chapbooks of an artist’s newest poetry through Amazon, you aren’t going to have an unknown poet’s work pushed to you by an algorithm at the end of that collection. 

And in many ways, you can recognize aspects of how poets are “discovered” by new fans that looks a lot like the music industry in the 90’s alternative boom, minus the MTV. Anthologies get released that collect multiple authors together. Publishing houses serve a similar role to labels. Thank-you sections and live readings with peers both do lots of heavy lifting for showing a poet’s fans others worth reading.

This doesn’t sound like much, by modern standards for creators. And it isn’t. Unless a writer lucks into the kind of Instagram-and-Tumblr-fueled breakout Rupi Kaur did 10 years ago, it’s nearly impossible to sustain working as a poet alone in the US. The best of those I’ve known in New York, the ones who eat, sleep, and breathe the written word, have gone on to become professors or author agents or high-level admins in retail bookselling. One specific internship at The New Yorker was often the top prize for student-poets I knew and heavily competed for, in my early years here. And this city, as with other creative fields, still has more opportunities for those sorts of day jobs than suburbia.

I can sense some of you particularly capitalist types wondering something. Let’s just ask the question you’re posing.

If one can’t succeed financially as a poet alone…why be a poet?

Well, why do you breathe?

Art has value because human life has value. I would argue that creating is part of life. The act of making art, all by itself, is a right place to start.

For marketers like myself, we then have to do what we can to help you sustain it. But art, for its own sake, has never had to be a capitalist thing. And poets are one of the greatest reminders of this, to me.

Creative energy’s space in the world is also one of the things that compels me so much about it. A small, focused idea can become the driving energy of the next several years of a person’s life, or even many other peoples’ lives. The greatest musicians, writers, and other creatives I’ve met have all had this thing within them that seems to have its own weight and speed attached, even if the shape of it changes as it evolves. That is not a thing that can be powered by the potential for monetary gain alone.

Our power and need to connect with other human beings, to create emotion and provoke thought, is vastly beyond the matter our bodies would seem to contain.

It has dimensions to it. I feel that this is why we use the phrase “larger than life” to describe rock stars: because when they connect, that’s what rock stars are. Think of them at their most generationally beloved. David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Freddie Mercury, Celine Dion. Each of those names carries force and weight behind it in our minds, with our own personal memories often included.

I have never heard a song that I felt could demonstrate the ability a person’s existence has to move as its own matter, like this.

But this is why I care so much about working with people across creative disciplines. Where one form of art may not quite illustrate a concept, another may reveal it. And I have read a poem that may help you picture this, by the late Mark Strand. 

Strand was a Pulitzer winner and a professor at Columbia while my old roommates were there, spoken about in hushed tones. He had an enormous, booming voice when he would read his work in public. Much of his work was deeply existential, almost to the point of nihilism. And yet, there was a peace to it all, as if he took comfort in the temporary and wished to explore it in plain language.

This is his poem, “Keeping Things Whole.”

Art made with intent has value because it exists, not because people purchase it. Look for peers who view themselves as bound to its continued creation, and it will give you the fuel you need to sustain work in any creative field, even when it gets hard. Before I was ever paid to work in the music industry, I was incredibly fortunate to count a few good poets as friends.

One Thing You Can Use Today

One of the best things you can do for yourself, from an executive function standpoint, is to master the balance between grit and flexibility.

Grit is a concept that’s explored heavily in behavioral psychology. It’s best described as the underlying mix of a person’s perseverance with their motivation to achieve an end goal, especially in the face of adversity. An oft-cited study in the mid-2000s concluded that a person’s level of grit is a stronger predictor of success than an IQ score. It’s also pointed to as the trait that is the strongest predictor of future success as an adult, among children. Notably, grit is a specialized field of study in itself, and not just a thing you’d expect from gunslingers in old Westerns.

Flexibility, from a cognitive standpoint, is about the capacity to recognize two truths at once and then move between them both. One example is to form connections with others in relationships, while also maintaining your own boundaries. If you’re an artist, flexibility can also take the form of doing what you need to do for survival (like a job that’s not within your discipline, for example) while also keeping track of what you need to do to progress.

But strategic plans, like those I build for artists, are where I think it’s most important to consider grit and flexibility both.

To succeed with a plan, you need to set it and stick to it. If you change it too much, it will no longer be effective.

But to succeed with a plan, you also need to be prepared to make strategic pivots. Recognize when one aspect of your plans has changed enough that it necessitates refining your strategy. Being proactive is incredibly important, but you must leave room to be reactive.

Grit is an intriguing cousin of that space-taking power our creative impulses hold. But grit, with flexibility, is truly something to behold. 

Track of the Week

Scattered Ashes - “Kingdom”

All tension, building and building, that becomes a release of its own. That’s the promise of Scattered Ashes and their song “Kingdom,” which doesn’t seem to have a chorus at all in the traditional sense, just a driving post-punk bass-and-electric-and-acoustic verse that continues forever with no real signs of stopping in the fade-out. They just got announced as part of The New Colossus lineup for March 2025, and if you think you won’t see me in the crowd when they make landfall, you aren’t paying enough attention.

Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

List of Clubs

These are the kinds of clubs I’d like to be in around NYC! Wherever you might find music, art, or a compelling experience under one roof, that’s a club to me. I only list clubs I’d enjoy going to. If I list a client, you’ll know.

Friday, October 25 - Italomatic @ H0L0
It’s well-established that I will see this party anywhere it occurs. H0L0 is an unusually good place to do that. The perfect place to reroute your night after whatever house parties you might hit first.

Saturday, October 26 - Early Voting Begins in New York
Make a plan. You’ve got between now and November 5 to vote, and you have plenty of time to find a spare hour for this.

Saturday, October 26 - Nation of Language, Secret Co-Headliner, Psymon Spine @ Brooklyn Navy Yard
I can’t tell you who the co-headliner is, but I’ve changed my plans completely about it. Starts at 6. Get there at 6.

Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

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