Poetry
Voucher.

The project began after I found a receipt printer and tried printing my own poems on it. The poems already existed. The question came from the everyday familiarity of a supermarket receipt: what would it feel like to acquire a piece of personal writing through a process meant to handle goods by the unit?

Writing can hold an uneven investment of time, attention, knowledge and attachment. The shop offers a different description: a title in a catalogue, a quantity, a base specification and a price. This is not a division between pure poetry and thoughtless commodities. Ordinary goods also contain labour and differences that their prices do not disclose. The work isolates one act of reduction rather than claiming an entire theory of markets.

The public catalogue is deliberately limited to my published texts. An earlier open-text Studio has been withdrawn. Choosing how a particular poem is issued is the invitation; composing an arbitrary printout is a different activity. This editorial boundary leaves the reader’s interpretation, and what happens to the copy afterwards, open.

Espeland and Stevens describe commensuration as comparison through a common metric. ^[1] PV3 supplies a small, inspectable instance: unlike poems become comparable sums by counting selected textual features. The formula is explicit about what it can see. It has no term for difficulty, revision, attachment or literary force.

Only Unicode letters and numbers count as characters. Non-empty source lines and stanzas add to the base amount; automatic wrapping on the narrow paper does not. The base is raised to the lowest .99 price not below that amount. Extras are added afterwards, so the final total need not end in .99.

The Roof Splits Open costs £12.99 in its first draft and £9.99 in its second. The source changes from 380 to 225 counted characters while its lines and stanzas stay constant. Deletion becomes a price reduction, regardless of what it does to the poem. That discrepancy invites comparison; it does not prove that the cheaper draft is better.

The steps also hide differences and exaggerate thresholds. A non-literary test of forty x characters is £1.99 as one line and £2.99 as two. Other added breaks leave the displayed price unchanged. This is a chosen retail convention, not a fair measure of length across writing systems or a model of how all shops price their goods.

Pixel type is the included edition. The website typefaces are an optional upgrade, like a product whose advertised appearance depends on an extra configuration. The basic edition must still be complete and readable. Deliberately degrading it would replace the question with a rigged demonstration.

The storefront is not outside this arrangement. Its serif display type, space and alignment make the offer attractive while it sells typography as an extra. The project both uses and exposes that appeal. An austere receipt does not make its surrounding website innocent of the prestige that design can confer.

A translation adds another linguistic and cultural reading, and a physical print would occupy more paper. Its fixed surcharge does not calculate paper length, energy or a translator’s working time. The poems and published translations can be read freely on the site; the extra belongs to the fictional output configuration, not an entrance fee to understanding. Traditional and Simplified Chinese are alternative scripts of the original at the same base price.

The receipt records the order, its quantities, extras, amounts and simulated payment. The poem voucher carries the text, byline, source and identifying number, without repeating its price. These are two kinds of document on one continuous strip, not necessarily two pieces of paper: one order may contain several separately numbered poem copies.

CUT HERE makes separation available after receipt and poem have been encountered together. Someone can keep the whole strip, cut it, fold it or pass on a part. None is a correct response that the interface should enforce. Numbering keeps the parts attributable; it does not authenticate a purchase, establish ownership or make a copy scarce.

The till’s British wording, columns, tax analysis and payment details supply a familiar administrative rhythm. The fictional notices are integral to that form, not small print to remove in pursuit of realism. No payment is processed. Here the voucher delivers a poem; it is not a promise of later cash redemption.

B3 repeatedly delays an act of delivery: the writing stops, the unsealed paper is folded again, and host and guest do not become equal parties in a settled exchange. Read after a receipt, those actions may make the certainty of a completed transaction feel inadequate. This is a reading the juxtaposition permits. The poem was not written to demonstrate it, and a reader need not adopt it.

Other relations belong to the source publications: B6 responds across the A/B sequence, while The Roof Splits Open retains its dated drafts. Issuing one poem should not force someone to acquire a whole sequence, but neither should a standalone copy pretend that no sequence exists. Source links allow a return to that context.

Drucker’s account shifts materiality towards what occurs in use. ^[2] For this work, choosing, waiting, reading, cutting and giving are therefore questions to observe, not effects guaranteed by paper or code. A pocketable poem can be a gift, a joke, a keepsake or waste. The receipt does not need every one of its fields to encode a separate metaphor.

The output model uses narrow thermal paper. The one-bit image retains the constraints of receipt printing. Dense labels and narrow lines are part of the encounter, but smallness is not a virtue if the poem becomes unreadable. A sharp digital image does not establish the survival of fine strokes on a particular printer.

Direct thermal printing uses no ink or ribbon; heat, light and handling can change its legibility. ^[3] Fading is not a reliable countdown built into the poem. It remains a material possibility, not an observed life span of these particular prints, an environmental claim or a required metaphor for loss.

Early physical prints exist. The browser shop is the present public route while no exhibition venue is available; a future issuing table would add the handling and shared time that a download does not provide. The screen encounter is nevertheless real. The PDF keeps receipt and poems in one file, with continuations for long outputs. A self-contained HTML counterpart preserves their full text and relationship for offline reading; it does not turn the image PDF into an accessible text PDF.

Poetry Voucher is a static browser application built around a fixed catalogue of my published poems. The former public Studio is retired: a reader configures an edition rather than supplying arbitrary text. Catalogue choice, script, published translations, typeface, size and quantity enter the same pricing and issuing process. Ordinary use does not upload the poem or contact a payment service.

Checkout freezes the contents of the order before output is produced: texts, quantities, charges, the fictional payment scene and the public renderer identity belong to that issued order. Reopening it later does not silently reprice the poems from the current catalogue. If a different renderer is used, the result is identified as a re-render. The renderer identifier describes build inputs, not a promise of identical pixels.

The frozen order is rendered into the narrow-paper image PDF and a separate self-contained HTML reading copy. The public website has no remote printer endpoint. On the paired H10S terminal only, an explicit print action can hand the already prepared order to its local print service.

Current public renderer

pv-render-6e3328e14363a6c8

Paper model

58 mm · 384 dots · 1 bit

Short Édition offers free scroll literature selected by reading duration. ^[4] The comparison separates a distribution medium from a work’s specific mechanism. Poetry Voucher asks for a poem and a configured edition, then assigns a fictional amount. Its claim depends on what that purchasing routine adds to reading, not on being the first to print literature on a narrow roll.

In Broodthaers’s Pense-Bête, plaster obstructs access to the embedded books; readable copies were also exhibited nearby. ^[5] Here the relation is reversed: the printed text is intended to leave its apparatus. Yet the risk is shared. An intriguing object can draw attention away from the writing. Making the receipt more convincing is not automatically an improvement if nobody reaches the poem.

The catalogue, pricing and digital issuing process can be used now. The early prints are material trials, not evidence that every current configuration is calibrated. The suggestion of carrying a poem to give away came from an early reader and was reported in the author interview. It has not been turned into a claim about audiences in general. No comparative reader study or gallery presentation is claimed here.

The next material test is modest: issue a few chosen editions, let people read and handle them without a preliminary theory lesson, and record what changes or fails. That may justify a decision to retain the receipt, alter an order of presentation or relinquish a proposed interpretation. More features cannot answer that question.

Personal saving, printing and giving printed copies are permitted. The author wrote and built most of this work; AI was used to review the website’s interaction logic and visual presentation, with final decisions made by the author. The shop selects existing poems and generates no poem text.