This is Part 2 (of 2) of my essay, “Great Audiences for Great Poetry,” adapted from a 2009 speech I gave at AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) when I was president of the Poetry Foundation.
The rather insipid title of my remarks, “Great Audiences for Great Poetry,” is adapted from Whitman’s famous dictum, “To have great poets there must be great audiences, too.” For many years Harriet Monroe ran that legend on the cover of Poetry. And she wrote, in her vision for the magazine, about the importance of audience:
This art (she wrote of poetry), like every other, is not a miracle of direct creation, but a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public. We believe that there is a public for poetry, that it will grow, and that as it becomes more numerous and appreciative the work produced in this art will grow in power, in beauty, in significance.
It seems clear that both Whitman and Harriet Monroe believed that poetry does not exist in a vacuum, that art draws energy and vitality from the public to which it is addressed, even as the public draws a reciprocal energy and vitality from the art. That synergistic relationship suggests a kind of “commerce” between the writers and readers of poetry, not in the corporate sense but in the sense Pound intended when, addressing himself to Whitman, he said, “Let there be commerce between us.”
That same, assumed antiphonal relationship between poetry and its audience was in the room when our Board wrote its mission statement for the Poetry Foundation which committed it to “a more vigorous presence for poetry in America,” and gave it a threefold assignment: “to discover and celebrate the best poetry, and to place it before the largest possible audience.” The underlying assumption was that “contemporary poetry’s striking absence from the public dialogues of our day, from the high school classroom, from bookstores, and from mainstream media, is evidence of a people in whose mind poetry is missing and unmissed.” The armature driving the Foundation’s strategy and programs was the belief that “a general, interested public is poetry’s greatest need.” That belief was not unique to the Poetry Foundation, of course; I think it was shared by all the poetry outreach organizations of that time.
Within five years of implementing that strategy, the Foundation had 17 full time employees and an annual budget of $ 7 million to operate the magazine and a family of new programs whose shared goal was to help poetry regain the readership it once enjoyed. Five years is not a long time in the history of an art form, but it is nevertheless tempting to compare the vision with which the Foundation started, with what actual experience taught us.
First, The Dream… As part of the flowering of America’s literary culture in the mid-19th century, newspapers commonly ran poems in their pages and the larger papers reviewed new books of poetry. Public speakers quoted poetry, and in that way made poetry part of the public dialogue. William Jennings Bryan even ran for president on a Cross of Gold speech whose Biblical cadences amounted to poetry: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. Children memorized Longfellow, Tennyson and Whittier in the classroom, and carried those poems by heart into old age. The dream, then, is to see contemporary poetry restored to that historic presence in the schools, the media and the public dialogue. In this vision poetry regains an extensive, nonprofessional readership and is thereby restored to mainstream American culture.
Then…the Reality. The poetry of Longfellow and his contemporaries, it turns out, is not Modernist poetry. Longfellow was a populist poet, even if he was no cracker barrel poet. (In fact he spoke eight languages and read more, and was Harvard’s and the world’s first professor of comparative literature. His great achievement was to import European culture and literary traditions into American verse — masterfully — and in so doing he created an American poetry that matched its European betters.) But his poems spoke to the man on the street, the mother by the fire, the children in their lessons. (“By the shores of Gitche Gumee//By the shining Big-Sea-Water” or “Listen my children, and you shall hear//Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere”) In his important essay on Longfellow, Dana Gioia muses how this major poet — the best-selling poet in American history — could have fallen into such complete critical neglect today. For the Foundation’s purposes, it was that wide and popular readership that gave poetry its vibrant place in American culture of the 19th century. Modernist poetry, as we have seen, seeks a different kind of relationship with its reader. 20th century American poetry has tended to value exclusivity. A poetry of alienation and despair has become the stuff of graduate seminars, not of campfire recitations. So any effort to restore poetry to its former place in American culture must recognize that poetry has changed, and so has America.
There is the further question of how poets today feel about having a large, nonprofessional readership for their work. In other arts this would not come up as a question. (Are playwrights and composers content to see their work performed to empty houses?) But any of you who attend to the monthly scrum in the back of Poetry magazine or on the Foundation’s blog Harriet will know that poets have a vexed relationship to the whole idea of audience. To understand what I mean by “vexed,” try this experiment. At your next poetry event, ask the poets in the room to raise their hands if they think Billy Collins is doing something important for American poetry when he fills auditoriums from coast to coast with his readings. Then ask these same poets to raise their hands if they are selling too many of their own books. My contention is that hands that do not go up on the first question will not go up on the second either, even though a broader poetry-reading public could benefit sales of their own books. Here’s what I think is going on: We can all agree that writing a poem is a form of self-expression. But not all agree that a poem should go beyond self-expression and strive to communicate with readers, let alone entertain them. Any good poet is trying to make something that is perfect within the four corners of the poem. But for the purist, the notion of modifying what the poem says or how it says it in order to be understood by someone else is subversive. Others, like Billy Collins I think, would agree with Samuel Johnson that the end of art is to instruct through pleasing. I would call the attitude of poets towards audience a big divide — maybe the biggest divide — in poetry today.
I believe that every poem implies its audience, and that a poem cannot be addressed to nobody. But I’ve learned that a poem’s intended audience can vary broadly (the poem’s “you” may be a child, a parent, someone living, someone dead, a lover, an ex-lover, a boatload of strangers). Some poems will find very few readers because they deal with things inherently difficult to talk about, or because they require special erudition, or because they push the envelope of how language communicates. For such poems 50 or 100 readers can be significant — both for the poet and for those readers whose minds are expanded by the work. The practical lesson here is that the goal of building a greater readership for poetry in this country has to be realized a poem at a time. During my tenure, the Foundation’s work was to help each poem find its greatest intended audience, whether that audience be few or many. A corollary is that we cannot take the size of a poet’s readership as an indicator of the poet’s potential significance. The critic Robert von Hallberg tells the story of Harmonium, “probably the most remarkable first book of American poems to appear since Leaves of Grass. The book had a printing of 1500, but in its first year fewer than 100 copies sold. Stevens’ royalties for the first half of 1924 amounted to $6.70. He wrote to Harriet Monroe: ‘I shall have to charter a boat and take my friends around the world.’ The book was remaindered by Knopf.”
Poetry’s presence in the traditional print media is in flux. Poetry’s presence online — in social media, blogs, podcasts, social-networking sites — flourishes, but getting poetry back into the classroom is a long-term challenge. Poetry along with the other arts continues to be marginalized in the curricula of public schools.
So what is there to learn from the experience of the Poetry Foundation in its first five years? Putting Ruth Lilly’s historic gift to work in support of poetry demands the kinds of planning and systematic effort that any business would apply to its resources. To do otherwise would be irresponsible to the gift. But the thing this gift serves, unlike a product of Procter & Gamble, is the very essence of unpredictability. (Poetry is not toothpaste. It is, in fact, one of the last legitimate sources of magic in human experience.) No one owns poetry, and certainly no one can plan it. Chaos theory and Gould’s book tell us that, if we were to rewind the tape to 1900 and replay it, poetry’s evolution into Modernism would not happen again. Because we cannot know in advance what will matter, the work of all those in the poetry community who support the art form is equally and vitally important. The innumerable editorial decisions taken today by literary magazines and small presses will surely influence — probably crucially — how poetry evolves in the century to come.
A closing thought: The Poetry Foundation, the membership of the CLMP, and all those like us should go about our work with humility and a healthy respect for the Theory of Unintended Consequences. My favorite example of that theory comes from the Falkland Islands War between Argentina and the U.K. Minefields were laid there during combat operations in the 1980s, and were never recovered. To this day people cannot walk there — but the feet of birds are too light to trigger the mines. The unintended consequence? The minefields have become de facto bird sanctuaries. Poetry is the animal that always escapes.