“The Poetic Economy”: Investigating Possibilities of No Return

Though utopian, the alternative to prevalent utilitarian ethics that gift theory offers poetry is not unworkable. Continuing structures of small press activity and performance from the sixties, the system I am terming “the poetic economy” is operational today; in institutions, publishers and venues nurturing, promoting and sustaining experimental poetries worldwide. Fundamental to an understanding of the type of economy in which innovative poetry functions today is a reconfiguration of theories of exchange, extending critical debate beyond Mauss’s 1969 publication of "The Gift, Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies".