From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Can $100 Million
Help Make
Poetry Matter?
The problem is one of outlook, not resources.
Between the noxious outpouring of Amiri Baraka and the PC maunderings of "Def Poetry Jam" in Manhattan, poetry has been short on good news of late. All that changed last week when word came out of Chicago that pharmaceuticals heiress Ruth Lilly plans to leave $100 million to Poetry Magazine.
The 60-page monthly has a circulation of 11,000, so it isn't necessarily a sign of philistinism to find something slightly disproportionate in this gift.
On the other hand, Ms. Lilly has made something of a track record as a supporter of the magazine. Back in the 1970s, she even submitted her own poems for publication, only to have them rejected. Clearly Ms. Lilly is nothing if not a good loser.
Which renders all the more urgent the question: Just what good is all that money going to do? Or to put it another way, what currently ails poetry that $100 million or more could plausibly ameliorate?
Gifts of the size of Ms. Lilly's are usually a response to some urgent social problem such as cancer or AIDS. Or they may be given in response to some institutional need--endowing a chair at a university or adding a wing onto a hospital. With such gifts, the size of the donation matches the size of the cause, and will, it is expected, exert an influence on a similarly large scale.
It's hard to see how this rule of thumb applies here, a fact not lost even on those at the epicenter of Ms. Lilly's philanthropic earthquake. Billy Collins, poet laureate of the U.S., told CNN last week that the bequest was a "healthy shot in the arm for poetry." A not unexpected response from a poet laureate. Still, when pressed for some explanation of the gift's beneficent effects on poetry, the nation's leading poet fell mute.
Even the magazine's evidently stunned editor, Joseph Parisi, was at a loss for words. He had some ideas, he told the New York Times: He was hiring money managers and planning to move into bigger offices, and maybe there could be a program to train middle- and high-school teachers to get their students interested in contemporary poetry.
The fact is, poetry's current problems aren't the sort that are easily solved by large infusions of money. A little more than a decade ago, Dana Gioia, a poet whom President Bush plans to nominate as chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, wrote a much-read essay in Atlantic Monthly called "Can Poetry Matter?"
"American poetry now belongs to a subculture," he wrote. "No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group."
And he went on to describe the central paradox of our poetic life: There have never been so many poets, poems or outlets for poetry, but all this activity takes place within an extremely narrow orbit, mostly universities and creative-writing programs. Thus, "over the past half century, as American poetry's specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined."
Ten years on, it's hard to see that anything's changed. Poetry's problem is one of outlook, not resources. Indeed, the two most interesting events in poetry in the past decade implicitly acknowledged the truth of Mr. Gioia's indictment.
In the early 1990s, during his tenure as poet laureate, Robert Pinsky sought to restore poetry's relevance to everyday life. To that end he initiated his "Favorite Poem Project," asking prominent Americans to name the poem they liked the most and then publishing the anthology. Hokey it might seem to some, but it went a way toward achieving its goal, which was to get all sorts of people reading and thinking about poetry.
Two years ago, the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney published his translation of Beowulf. Most people who went to school when such poems were on the reading list likely haven't thought of this medieval English epic since their college days. Yet Mr. Heaney's celebrity (he is one of the few living poets whose name almost everyone knows) combined with his well-received translation drew Beowulf to the attention of a large audience.
Tellingly, both these enterprises were, relatively speaking, small-scale, low-budget operations. Yet they had an impact out of all proportion to their size.
In coming up with a good use for his windfall, Mr. Parisi should follow where Messrs. Pinsky and Heaney have led and regard it as his urgent mission to reconnect poetry with the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.
This doesn't mean teaching courses in contemporary poetry, at least not before reintroducing the classics, and so reminding students why poetry is at the core of our own and every other nation's literary heritage.
If he does this, he will fittingly honor Ms. Lilly's generosity--and give Mr. Collins something to say the next time he's asked why it was such a good thing.
Mr. Gibson is the Leisure & Arts features editor.
