QUILLBLOG

Read poetry, get laid

The New Yorker‘s Dana Goodyear has written an excellent (and meaty) piece about the Chicago-based Poetry magazine. In 2002, Poetry and its accompanying foundation was bequeathed the staggeringly ridiculous sum of $200-million by the Indianapolis poet and heiress Ruth Lilly, and ever since they’ve been trying to figure out ways to use the money to return poetry to a state of prominence in the public sphere.

One of the first changes to the Poetry Foundation was the hiring of a new president, John Barr, a former Wall Street executive with literary aspirations. According to Goodyear, Barr and his staff are trying to turn the magazine and its website into “the Billboard or the Entertainment Weekly of the poetry world, reflecting everything that’s happening without a dogmatic point of view.” This, of course, has put a number of poets’ noses out of joint, as has the foundation’s plan for the $200-million, which will apparently not be spent on grants to poets.

As Ethel Kaplan, a lawyer at a wealth-management firm and the chair of the board, put it, “Nobody wanted to sit back and read grant proposals—especially from poets.”

Instead, it seems, the plan is to use the money to make inroads in the popular media. One of the Poetry Foundation’s most interesting efforts of late has been to offer its services as an external poetry editor:

Over the past year, it has sent a dozen magazine editors mockups with poems superimposed on actual layouts from those magazines (a Basho haiku in a Good Housekeeping spread showing how to “pair old china with fresh blooms”; Lucille Clifton’s “Homage to My Hips” on a fitness page called “Love Your Curves”). To Details, the foundation suggested an essay by Jim Harrison: “If Jim Harrison, poet, novelist (Legends of the Fall) and walking vat of testosterone, needs a daily shot of poetry, it must not be for sissies. . . . A good hed for the piece might be ‘Don’t Be Afraid of Poetry.’ A better one might be ‘Read Poetry. Get Laid.’”

Now if the Poetry Foundation can only get Maxim to publish a spread featuring “There Once Was a Girl From Nantucket,” that’ll be $200-million well spent!