A Poet--an Endangered Species--Talks Back

I’m a poet. I’ve been practicing my craft and main love for more than 20 years in Los Angeles. Most of you who are reading this probably have no awareness of what happens at poetry readings. Some of you might want to check out our scene and a few of you might come to like it. But you may not get the chance. My friends and I are an endangered species.

We are threatened because some folks in Congress are talking about eliminating funding for arts organizations. Such actions might not seem to have much effect on your lives, but I know it will be bad for us. Many of the places where we give our readings are funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts or state and local agencies. Our safe, warm refuges for poetry have been losing funding since the early ‘80s (that was also when a lot of magazines and presses that specialized in poetry and serious literature had to fold for lack of funding). We’ve become accustomed to not getting paid for performing our work, but we really worry about having fewer-than-ever places to go to read or hear others read.

I’d feel empty without Beyond Baroque in Venice as a place to go to for poetry, performance art, visual art, even unusual films. But Beyond Baroque is already so strapped for money that my friend Jessica Pompei, who runs the poetry workshop and open readings, was begging people recently to bring in old furniture to decorate the place!

I’m not asking you to care too much about the way we poets have to live. We’re used to it--kind of. We’re used to working at jobs that have nothing to do with our interests, or even our skills, in order to survive. We’re used to not getting fees for being published or for doing readings. We’re used to being the least known, least respected of artists in a society that rewards such cultural phenomena as video games, sequels, remakes, violent movies, interactive- virtual-nostalgia- least-objectionable- high-concept-green- lighted-three-hour- rotation-No. 1- with-a-bullet-easy- on-the-brains- entertainment.

But I don’t think I could put up with not having any place to go to interact, get nostalgic and develop high intellectual concepts with my fellow poets and writers. And if the conservative pundits in Congress have their way, we will indeed be out on the street, abandoned by America. For America to not support poetry seems just plain un-American.

Poetry exists in your American lives. Without poetry, you would not have song lyrics or even advertising jingles--for it is always the low-profile, avant-garde art forms that inform the popular culture. Who knows, maybe even Newt Gingrich has a favorite poem.

Please, America, do not abandon your poets. Even if you think you can’t understand us sometimes. We don’t always rhyme, but we think we’ve got reason--reason to be.

Lynne Bronstein has published three books of poetry with no government funding--and reads regularly at Beyond Baroque, which does receive funding.