In a world of poets, not readers

By TIM RUTTEN

Nov. 23, 2002 12 AM PT

According to the Tang dynasty poet Li Po, “a man should stir himself with poetry, stand firm in ritual and complete himself with art and music.”

Thirteen hundred years later, that’s still pretty sound advice.

But enduring Confucian virtues notwithstanding, if a guy really wants to get some buzz going, he should stir up poetry with money. That’s what Ruth Lilly -- the selfless 87-year-old heiress to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune--did last week, when she quietly gave Poetry magazine a gift whose ultimate value may reach $150 million. She also continues to fund the annual $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Her generosity to the 90-year-old Chicago publication generated headlines and columns around the world not only because of the donation’s size, but also because the magazine and its editor of 25 years, Joseph Parisi, have rejected all the numerous poems Lilly has submitted during the past few decades.

Virtue rewarded makes a fine story, especially when it has a rags-to-riches ending. Poetry qualifies on both counts. Continuously published since 1912, the magazine has operated for the past 15 years out of two rooms provided rent-free in the stacks of the Newberry Library’s annex. The four staff members have one window among them.

The 300 to 500 poems they select for publication each year continue a distinguished tradition. In its early years, Poetry championed the work of pioneering modernists. T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” first appeared in its pages, as did Ezra Pound’s great “imagist” poem “In a Station of the Metro.” It published early work by William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost, and furthered Marianne Moore’s career. Poetry was one of the first U.S. publications to recognize Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney’s work, which it published in 1972. More recently, the magazine put together a dual-language -- English and Gaelic -- edition of 37 contemporary Irish poets with a critical overview by Dennis O’Driscoll.

High standards rooted squarely in the international poetic mainstream are Poetry’s hallmark and probably make it a good choice to become the Getty of little magazines.

Buried deep in the avalanche of stories about the magazine’s good fortune, however, was a set of numbers that ought to arch the eyebrows of anybody who cares about culture generally and poetry in particular:

According to Parisi, Poetry receives 90,000 submissions from 45 countries each year.

Its total circulation per issue?

Just 10,000 copies.

In fact, despite all the international publicity generated by Lilly’s bequest, the magazine reported that it had signed up only 165 new subscribers this past week.

Nor is Poetry’s situation unique. According to the New York-based Academy of American Poets, the vast majority of the roughly 1,700 U.S. publications that regularly print poetry have average circulations of 1,000 copies or fewer.

Now, a materially minded person might suggest that in market terms, what we have is a serious imbalance between supply and demand. In other words, a lot more people are writing poetry than are reading it.

Is that a bad thing or an inevitable thing? Does it suggest something disturbing about readers or say something damning about the kind of poetry generally being written? Welcome to a debate that has been going on for more than half a century -- one that has provoked legions of literate and passionate people into torrents of biting, bracing, intemperate, articulate speech.

As long ago as 1934, the great Edmund Wilson published a controversial essay -- “Is Verse a Dying Technique” -- in which he alleged that the ubiquity of lyric poetry had rendered the art so ephemeral that the future belonged decisively to prose. In 1988, Joseph Epstein published a similarly contentious essay -- “Who Killed Poetry?” -- in which he argued that contemporary poetry was losing readers because the modernists’ broad cultural vision had been replaced by the parochial preoccupations of “poetry professionals,” most of whom were at universities.

That critique was developed in far greater detail in a 1991 essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” by poet and critic Dana Gioia -- now President George W. Bush’s nominee to head the National Endowment for the Arts -- who pointed out that it “never has been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels.”

Gioia went on to cite the vast system of public and private subsidies now provided poetry publishing and reading, as well as the existence of more than “200 graduate creative writing programs ... and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of 10 poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade.”

And so they have -- and so Poetry magazine’s 90,000 annual submissions. Gioia, however, went on to decry what he sees as the disconnect between those submitters of poetry and the potential readers of poetry. The furor that followed was too large and intense to recount here, but there is the inconvenient fact of the very worthy Poetry’s 10,000 subscribers.

“Dana’s point is that poetry publishing is supply-driven and not demand-driven,” said Malcolm Margolin, founder and publisher of Berkeley-based Heyday Books, which has published a dozen volumes of poetry during the past three years. “But that’s not entirely a bad thing and it’s not the only relevant thing to be said about poetry. There’s tremendous joy in writing poetry -- in the private struggle with one’s self and one’s experience of the world. I worship poetry precisely because it’s more valuable as an activity than as a commodity to be sold. It doesn’t get any better than writing poetry for your girlfriend, but it’s something else when you want to send that poem out into the world of commerce to be consumed by strangers. It’s a delusion to think anybody out there will give a damn about your soul, no matter how magnificent the transformative experience of writing the poem has been for you.”

It’s also worth recalling that at the very moments Wilson, Epstein and Gioia wrote their essays, great poetry was being written by the small number of artists in each generation who truly merit that description.

So there you have it: A staggering amount of poetry is being written and most of it has value only to its author. Some of it, however, is great and will stir its readers when Li Po’s admonition is 2,300 years old. Here, for example, are some lines presented for no other reason than that they are wonderful and deserve to be read. They were written a few years ago in Polish by Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz during his long sojourn in Berkeley and translated into English by former U.S. Poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

They are a convincing summation of the wisdom to be gleaned from the terrible century through which the world has passed and a bracing reminder of great poetry’s role in putting such lessons before our eyes:

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.

No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,

No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

It establishes the universal ideas in language,

And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice

With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.

It puts what should be above things as they are,

Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.

It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,

Giving us the estate of the world to manage.

It saves austere and transparent phrases

From the filthy discord of tortured words.