Poetry to the People

Two years ago, when Russian emigre Joseph Brodsky was America’s poet laureate, he proposed in the New Republic a scheme for distributing free copies of representative American poetry in hotels, waiting rooms, bus stops and the like. The notion, as he described it, seemed so melancholy/droll, so wistfully ludicrous, so bravely doomed that it made me smile and sigh at once. Ah yes! How wonderful it would be! But, of course, it couldn’t be, not here. Either this was socialist nostalgia or it was Brodsky being Russian, making us laugh while breaking our hearts with his intimations of impossibility.

At about the same time, however, Brigitte Weeks, editor-in-chief at the Book-of-the-Month Club, was reacting in her own way to the same twin convictions that moved Brodsky: first, that American poetry is a treasure; second, that so far as most Americans are concerned, the treasure is buried. Weeks is an English immigrant, and neither English nor Russian schoolchildren are raised to believe that the Americans are a race of poets. For her as for him, American poetry was an adult discovery.

Weeks concluded that her adopted country needed a user-friendly anthology of its best poets: neither the 50 best newcomers of the past year nor even the 50 best poets in U.S. history but, in some depth, the four or five American poets whom every literate American should not just know, but know intimately.

As editor for this anthology, Weeks recruited a man who may fairly be described as the American literary establishment in person. Joel Conarroe, currently president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, was formerly executive director of the Modern Language Association and editor of its renowned journal. The author of book-length studies of William Carlos Williams and John Berryman, Conarroe has served on every literary jury from the Pulitzer to the PEN to the National Book Critics Circle to the National Book Awards, where he has just concluded a term as president of the parent National Book Foundation.

He is, in short, scarcely the man to whom one would turn for an anti-establishment poetry anthology, and yet of the six poets Conarroe selected for the anthology published jointly by Random House and the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1991, two are gay, one is black, and one is a woman. The poets in “Six American Poets” are: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and Langston Hughes. If the six are as canonical as any six American poets can be (and they are), then the canon itself must be anti-establishment (and it is).

Conarroe’s 35-page introduction to this volume and his separate brief introductions to each of the six poets give the reader just enough to begin reading. The poets may be American monuments, but Conarroe’s manner with them is personal rather than reverential. One finishes each introduction and starts the poetry rather as one might set out, after a tasty breakfast, on a mountain hike with an expertly packed, light-as-a-feather rucksack riding high on one’s shoulders.

Each of these poets began in a different kind of personal prison. Each achieved a different kind of liberation. And each, however obscurely, connected that personal liberation with the American project. I would not exaggerate this point or suggest that Conarroe pursues it. But it would be easy to imagine another sextet of American poets who could not be joined in this way--say, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Penn Warren, Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot.

In mid-May, Brodsky, Weeks, and Conarroe all came together at the Library of Congress to hear six dignitaries (including Brodsky) read from Conarroe’s anthology. The occasion was created by a recent Columbia graduate, Andrew Carroll, who read Brodsky’s modest proposal and instead of saying to himself, as I did, “What poignant comedy!” said “What a great idea!” and, amazingly, is about to enact it. “Six American Poets,” now a Book-of-the-Month paperback, is about to have a limited but significant free distribution thanks to the 2,000 copies the BOMC is giving Carroll for hospitals and hotels. (Locally, 250 copies will be distributed at Santa Monical Hospital Medical Center.)

Think of it, as Carroll himself does, as the literary equivalent of the Gideon Bible project. An anonymous donor has funded another 4,000 copies, which will go to USAir Clubs, Club Med, Doubletree Inns, and Guest Quarters over the coming summer. The effort, backed by the Poetry Society of America and Literacy Volunteers of America and calling itself The American Poetry & Literacy Project, hopes to attract further funding in the months ahead.

Only in America? Maybe so, but I would put it a little differently: Only in an America unafraid to make a Russian its poet laureate and put an Englishwoman in charge of its national reading list. Joel Conarroe edited “Six American Poets,” and Andrew Carroll has set up the free distribution of it, but Brigitte Weeks gave Conarroe the idea, and Joseph Brodsky gave Carroll the idea. Year in and year out, that’s the kind of only-in-America that has worked best. It’s a pleasure to see it working again.

The American Poetry & Literacy Project may be reached at 1058 Thomas Jefferson St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007. Telephone (202) 338-1109).