Poetry Lovers Turn Tax Day to Their Profit

With an opening blast like “April is the cruellest month,” it was probably inevitable that someone would link that most modern of poems, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” with the day many modern Americans find odiously cruel: April 15, Tax Day.

And so poetry boosters in seven big cities will be handing out pocket-size copies of Eliot’s poem at post offices Tuesday night as taxpayers scurry to get that all-important pre-midnight postmark. (“Hurry up please its time,” Eliot wrote.)

Giving away “The Waste Land” is the latest attempt by the New York-based Academy of American Poets, aided by several like-minded literary groups, to lure prosaic Americans into verse.

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The poems will be distributed at central post offices in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Washington. Not, alas, in Los Angeles, which to the academy’s lights seemed too spread out and lacking a centralized focus (several L.A. post offices will stay open until midnight), nor in Eliot’s native St. Louis, where postal officials did not want to be seen as rewarding tax procrastinators.

In Washington, Andrew Carroll, co-founder of the American Poetry & Literacy Project, will throw dignity overboard by wearing a sandwich board advertising April as the second annual National Poetry Month. “There is no level to which we will not stoop to promote poetry,” Carroll said.

As Alina Interian, executive director of the Miami Book Fair International, put it: “We want people to turn off their televisions and turn on their poetry.”

Or as Gina Mackintosh, director of California Poets in the Schools and organizer of the San Francisco giveaway, said: “We want to show people that poetry is not the Brussels sprouts of literature. It can be fun.”

Fun, of course, is not a word commonly associated with Eliot’s dire, dank, darned difficult 434-line poem, what with its six different languages (including Sanskrit), shifting narrators, loads of literary allusions and footnotes that, depending on which critic you believe, are either the quintessence of erudition or a sendup of academic pedantry.

Harcourt Brace & Co., long a publisher of Eliot, is aiding the post office project by providing thousands of special-edition paperback copies of the poem, each with an afterword by Eliot scholar Christopher Ricks.

The special edition (which normally retails at $4) is meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the poem’s publication.

It could as well commemorate 75 years of debate between critics who believe “The Waste Land” is the most influential English-language poem of the 20th century and those who accuse it of making a cult of obtuseness. It does not help, as Ricks notes in his essay, that Eliot dismissed his own work as “a wholly insignificant grouse” and “just a piece of rhythmical grumbling” late in his life.

“Eliot was not part of the culture of accessibility,” said Bill Wadsworth, executive director of the Academy of American Poets. “But even in high school, where ‘The Waste Land’ is widely taught, students are drawn to it even if they don’t understand it. Frankly, who does understand it? W.H. Auden said great poetry comes from memorable speech, and Eliot is certainly memorable.”

As much as he might have been discomfited by the prospect, it seems clear that Eliot, who, according to literature professor Pierre Joris, became a British subject because he “couldn’t deal with the multi-chaotic society of America,” is being swept up in a growing phenomenon that is uniquely American: Tax Day hoopla.

In Boston, the poetry giveaway will be part of a night of frivolity at the Dorchester Avenue post office, complete with electric keyboard music, free Excedrin dispensed by a person in a giant Excedrin bottle, free ice cream, free cookies, free coffee, free copying services and an appearance by Uncle Sam. Unfortunately, Betsy Ross is booked at Woburn, Mass., and can’t be in Boston.

One of the world’s largest self-taxing countries is learning to turn something onerous into something at least bearable, if not altogether mirth inspiring.

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In Boise, Ida., the Boise Symphony Orchestra will serenade late tax filers, and in Monterey, Calif., a rhythm and blues band will wail until midnight. In Springfield, Ill., an Elvis Presley impersonator will provide stylings of “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Jailhouse Rock.”

Uncle Sam will shake hands in Fayetteville, N.C., and Chattanooga, Tenn.; in Staten Island, N.Y., nurses will provide free blood pressure tests; in Denver, free back rubs will be offered to relieve 1040-form stress; in Harrisburg, Pa., the Central Pennsylvania Blood Bank will ask for donations of blood; and in various cities, including San Diego, taxpayers can pay to plunk Internal Revenue Service agents in dunking pools, with the proceeds going to charity.

Into this comes a decided buttoned-up poet, who was 34 in 1922 when his poem about the emotional and intellectual sterility of post-World War I society was published.

“The connection between Eliot and taxation is quite daft, but I don’t think Eliot would have minded,” said Ricks, a professor at Boston University and editor of the recent “Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917,” a collection of early Eliot poetry including some heretofore-unknown bawdy verse. “He cooperated with publicity, and he knew that hype was needed sometimes.”

Joris, a professor at the State University of New York at Albany and co-editor of the anthology “Poems for the Millennium,” said “The Waste Land” is “the best known of the high modernist poems” and quickly became a benchmark for critics and poets because it reflected the despair wrought by World War I.

“It was a very powerful statement about cultural and personal loss,” Joris said.

The palpable sense of dislocation is present from the beginning. April is not a season of growth and renewal but only a reminder of loss:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain

Winter kept us warm . . .

“We know ‘The Waste Land’ is tough for the layperson,” said Don Lee, editor of the Boston-based literary journal Ploughshares. “What we’re hoping for is that people will give it a chance to let its language wash over them.”

And such language it is: “the broken fingernails of dirty hands,” “dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit,” “Unreal City/Under the brown fog of a winter noon,” “A rat crept softly through the vegetation/Dragging its slimy belly on the bank,” “And bats with baby faces in violet light/Whistled and beat their wings,” and more.

Tax Day will come and go, but the efforts to inject poetry into American life will continue apace.

The American Poetry & Literacy Project has been passing out copies of Edgar Allen Poe on Halloween, getting telephone directories to include poetry, and distributing books of poetry to motels, hotels, trains, airports (including LAX), schools and homeless shelters.

“There’s an old saying: ‘The hardest part of practicing a musical instrument is taking the instrument out of the case,’ ” Carroll said. “That’s what we’re trying to do. Make the instrument of poetry readily available.”