"Worth"

"The economy of poetry is antipathetic to profit, it’s a 'negative' economy. As James Sherry once remarked, if you take a sheet of plain white paper, perhaps it’s worth a penny, but if you write a poem on it, it’s worth nothing. It can no longer be sold. But, then again, that nothing is worth quite a lot. You’ve created negative value. Put a different way, that just shows that there are different kinds of economies and that poetry is an exchange economy."

--from "What does it mean to be a poet in our time: Interview with Charles Bernstein" by Eric Denut