This story by Jodi Jahrling appeared in The Daily Yonder on June 18, 2026.
There’s an Italian wine shop that I follow on Instagram and every week the owner steps outside his shop, stands on a box, and recites poetry. People make it part of their routine to go listen. I do not speak the language but I cannot stop watching.
There’s a poet in New York City – also on Instagram – who sets up a table on the sidewalk and writes poems for people passing by. She charges $75 per poem. Recently, she mentioned that she needed help managing her subscription service, which is over 1000 subscribers. People pay to have her work mailed to them all over the country. In New York City, poetry can be a full time job.
That’s when it hit me. Why not here?
I live and work in Cortez, Colorado, a town of about 9,000 people in the southwest corner of the state. I started the ZU Gallery (named after our county, Montezuma), an art gallery that evolved into a wine bar and live music venue because that is what the community needed. Survival as a small business in a small town requires adaptation.
For five years I have hosted hundreds of events, paid every artist who performed, and kept nearly all of it free to the public. In my work running the gallery, I saw artists doing incredible work who were not getting compensated accordingly. Eventually, they’d leave town, get another job, or stop doing art.
This is how the art industry actually works in a small town. You submit your work to a publication or a contest and hear nothing. You self publish and nobody reviews it. Someone gives a public performance for free, which, while not malintentioned, makes it harder for everyone else to ask for what they are worth. Those who can afford to pay for a poetry collection often expect to pay less because of where they live.
Rural writers get treated like a discount. There is no safety net for art. No grant for when the laptop dies or the residency falls through. No pension for the poet who put everything into their community. We have all heard the same story. If you are serious about your art you need to leave. Move to a big city. What happens in a small town is quaint and unimportant. Real infrastructure, real investment, real opportunity belongs somewhere else.
I stopped believing that.
This spring, ZU Arts Initiative, my nonprofit, launched The Patio Poets, an annual poetry subscription that features twelve poets from rural Southwest Colorado, pays them fairly, and mails their work as printed broadsides to subscribers anywhere in the United States. The New York City poet charges $75 per poem, so we decided to pay our poets the same. As the subscription program grows, their earning will grow.
Thirty poets applied. Twelve were selected by a panel of artists.. The selection is public. The pay is public. The numbers are shared because poets deserve to know what their work is worth.
You build most things without knowing if they will work.The hardest part is not the idea, it’s the logistics. Getting twelve poets in a room at the same time is quite a feat. For our first cohort meeting we managed eleven. The twelfth, who is quite accomplished, was giving a poetry workshop of her own.
The eleven who showed up came from Durango, Mancos, Cortez, Lewis, Dolores, and Dove Creek, small towns around southwest Colorado. Most of them did not know each other. They were archaeologists and activists, debut voices and published authors, songwriters and slam poets. One has a national prize-winning collection coming out this fall. Others have never shown their work to anyone outside their family. All of them live and write here.
We started the evening with an icebreaker. One sheet of paper passed around the room. Each poet added one line. I wrote the first. When the paper came back one of the Patio Poets stood up and read the whole thing aloud. It was strange and beautiful and entirely theirs. The first poem the 2026 Patio Poets ever wrote together, read by one of their own on the very first night.
One poet read their work aloud for the first time. Everyone in the room was honored to be there for it.
What surprised me most was how quickly these poets connected with each other. They are all from different towns, different backgrounds, and have different relationships to the page. But they share the same landscape outside their windows. The same stubborn decision to stay and make great work here anyway.
The program evolved that night too. The original plan was for each poet to read outside during their featured month. After talking it through, the poets settled on the warmer months of July, August, September, and October, deciding to read as trios rather than alone. Each poet pulled their month from a coffee cup. I let them swap as needed. By the end of the evening the calendar was set, the months were claimed, and eleven poets who mostly did not know each other were already figuring out how to share a stage. The twelfth will join them when she is ready.
The actual hardest part is still ahead. Getting subscriptions. Getting these poems onto walls in homes across the country. Proving that a rural poet subscription service can work the way it works for that poet on the sidewalk in New York City.
The program is young. The poets are ready. The broadsides are coming.
The point is not the subscriptions. It’s that the work happening here, in rural America, is worth paying for, worth printing, worth putting on walls in homes across the country. The gifts that this place has been sitting on are finally getting some much deserved attention.
The ZU Arts Initiative is less than a year old. There is a lot left to build. But the need for a paid outlet for rural artists is real. The artists are here and that is reason enough to keep going.
Jodi Jahrling is the owner of ZU Gallery and the Executive Director of ZU Arts Initiative, a nonprofit cultural commons based in Cortez, Colorado.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.