Ruth Lilly, heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, has made a donation to Poetry magazine estimated to be worth at least $100 million. It’s an interesting proposition, not nearly as random in nature as some of those who have publicly bewailed her foolishness have suggested, and is likely to set off any number of consequences, intended and otherwise. Let’s cast a cold eye at the facts:

 

§         Poetry is a monthly magazine that has been around for some 90 years, currently with a subscription base of about 10,000, down some 20 percent from its high point of a few years back.

§         Its current annual budget of around $65,000 enables it to actually print over 100,000 individual copies of the magazine per year and employ a staff of four, a record of frugality that is worth noting (though subsidized by such things as free rent and, I believe, academic salaries).

§         For the past 33 years, since the sudden death of then-editor Henry Rago, Poetry has been merely one of several larger publications associated with what I’ve been calling the school of quietude, no better, no worse.

§         Poetry’s fabled beginning as the official publication of American modernism, of which much has been made, is to some degree a myth – a look at any early issues that do not reflect the somewhat overbearing assistance of Ezra Pound shows the publication to have almost always been at heart muddled in the middle of the road, with a bias toward the conservative.

§         There was a period of greater diversity and experimentation between the late 1940s, when Hayden Carruth & Karl Shapiro were briefly in the editor’s role, & Rago’s death in 1969 – particularly during the latter half of Rago’s 1955-69 tenure – but was something of an aberration in its history.

§         During that brief period – 1962 through ’69 – Poetry actually achieved for a brief moment what its editors seem always to have envisioned as the magazine’s true role, as the closest thing possible to “the publication of record” for American verse culture. During this period, it was where poets of all stripe would invariably send the poems they envisioned as the title pieces for their next works. It not only published the best of everybody, but did so with a balance that reflected a much larger vision of American poetry. Let’s look at three representative issues from that period:

1.      October , 1965. The issue is devoted to a single poem, Louis Zukofsky’s “A”-14, Beginning An. In addition, there are three reviews: one of All by Robert Creeley; a second review of the same book by “Thomas” Clark (not yet Tom, although already poetry editor of The Paris Review); a review of Bottom and After I’s by Gerard Malanga. Finally, there is an article on Blake by Zukofsky, “Pronounced Golgonoozà.” Is the publication you associate with Poetry today?

2.      March, 1967. A general issue. The lead poet on the cover is Denise Levertov, listed next to the title of her poem, “A Vision.” Also on the top portion of the cover with their works more or less listed are, in this order, John Logan, Tom (now it’s Tom) Clark, John Woods, Thomas McGrath & Edward Dorn (“The Sundering U.P. Tracks,” one of his finest poems). On the center of the cover, six other poets are listed without mention of titles: Barry Spacks, Etta Blum, James L. Weil (a fine poet in the Corman tradition, better remembered today as the publisher of Elizabeth Press books), John Ingwersen (“his first appearance anywhere” according to the contributor’s note), Louise Gluck and Frank Samperi. There are also five critical articles by Laurence Lieberman, Hayden Carruth, Donald W. Baker, Robert Sward, and Philip Legler. These reviews cover some 19 books of poetry, ranging from Richard Lattimore to Harriet Zinnes. Sward’s review includes, in addition to a volume by Keith Wilson, three books published by Aram Saroyan’s Lines Editions, by Richard Kolmar, John Perrault and Clark Coolidge. Levertov & Logan, Woods & Dorn, Spacks & Weil – this is an almost panoptic view of American poetry. The Sward review, which infamously slam’s Coolidge’s Flag Flutter & U.S. Electric (“slippery sort of instant poetry,” “a psychedelic outpouring,” verbal hop-scotch,” “an inspired centipede,” “no actual imagination” “a dead-end,” “chic, trivial piling up of images,”  “finally a bore,” “irrelevant preening,” “self devouring cuteness,” “virtually without voice,” “nothing of any human urgency,” “pointless curios”) is entitled “Landscape and Language,” the first use of that latter noun in association with Coolidge or any of the langpos yet to be. While Sward’s piece is hysterically (& historically) wrong in its view of Coolidge as a dead-end, the willingness of the publication to offer such partisan fare differs sharply from Poetry’s current approach to the post-avant world, one of benign neglect, acting as though it simply does not exist.

3.      January, 1969. Another general issue. Just two poets listed alongside the titles of their contributions in this issue, Kenneth Koch (“Sleeping with Women”) and Helen Singer. Then comes the first of two clusters of other poets: Philip Booth, Anselm Hollo, Larry Eigner, David Galler & Lewis Turco. That’s quite a quintet. The second group includes four poets making first appearances: Mitchell Goodman (the novelist & then still married to Levertov), Stephen Dobyns, Hugh Seidman and “Ronald” (yes!) Silliman, identified in the contributor’s notes as a sophomore at “San Francisco College” (sic) and a postal clerk. Ralph J. Mills has the entire critical section in which he actually reviews 30 books – just try to imagine that as a project – a strategy to reviewing that was not uncommon at Poetry during the 1960s. Contributing Editor Hugh Kenner has a letter, correcting a detail from an earlier article on Pound.

This last issue appeared just before Rago’s death, which occurred while he was taking time off to write, leaving “Visiting Editor” Daryl Hine (a Canadian old formalist) to accidentally inherit the journal and take it rightward with a vengeance.*

 

I go on at some length here to make a point. Putting Kenneth Koch along side Helen Singer, or Louise Gluck on the same line as Frank Samperi is an act of radically representing the breadth of American poetry on a scale that has not even been attempted in the 33 years since Henry Rago died. While there certainly are a lot of little magazines, especially around colleges, that will publish poetry of any stripe, none do so with any sense of shape as to the broader whole, even if that vision is understood as the editor’s first responsibility. And without that sense of shape, they also lack the potential for impact.

 

It is worth noting that this broad view was still the image of Poetry that lingered for some time after Rago’s passing – indeed, it was still the image of the magazine back when Ruth Lilly was submitting her poems to then associate editor Joseph Parisi. If the publication today is viewed as sleepy & harmless, a narrow journal that drifts between the sclerotic & the bathetic, it was not (and need not be) always thus.

 

If Hine’s takeover was accidental, so in a way is the Lilly endowment – while it was not an accident that Lilly chose Poetry, the publication appears not to have planned for such a gift. $100 million might do a lot. But let’s take a look at what it will not do – change the balance of power between the two primary traditions in American literature. The mainstream will continue to have all the resources. The Whitman-Dickinson / Pound-Williams-Stein-Zukofsky / New American tradition will continue to have all the poetry & fun.

 

What it is much more likely to do is to radically transform the power relations within the school of quietude. APR and all the other pretenders to Poetry’s role as the hegemonic “mainstream” journal of verse are now cast as establishment subalterns, a curious phenomenon indeed.

 

Parisi, to his credit, seems – if his public statements are any indication – to understand that this changes his role dramatically. He is now the CEO of the largest poetry non-profit organization in the world, a role that may well soon preclude his editing a journal that is sure to be only one of many Modern Poetry Association projects. Parisi himself is already talking about teaching institutes, high school programs, and a line of books.

 

I have seen the word “horror” used to describe the potential of a generation of high school students introduced to American poetry through the vision of Poetry magazine as it is currently edited. But I don’t agree. It hardly matters what poetry a teenager is introduced to if they have, at some point, that “aha” experience that will set them off to be serious readers & possible writers of poetry for the rest of their lives. The absolute number of post-avant writers who themselves began as students of the most reactionary professors imaginable makes it quite clear that, if these students are going to find their way, they will do so as people always do, on their own.

 

So even in the worse case scenario, one in which Poetry & the Modern Poetry Association acquire pseudo-state status over many institutions of poetry, rather like the role of the Red Cross in medicine, it is likely to have very little impact on the post-avant world that I inhabit, and the poetry about which I care most deeply. In this sense, it is a non-event.

 

If anything, simply the need to expand its horizons in order to make use of such sudden abundance, Poetry might even take a step or two back in the direction of Henry Rago’s heyday. One obvious first task would be to hire a new full-time editor for the magazine so that Parisi can turn his attention full-time to the institution building tasks that are now on his plate whether he wants them there or not. It would be great – even utopian – if he were to hire somebody with the breadth and vision for American verse that Rago had and who would stretch the magazine beyond its current narrow confines. C.D. Wright would be an stellar example of such a person, but even in Parisi’s own back yard he can find Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff, whose New American Writing for over 20 years has done a far better job at representing its subject than Poetry.

 

 

 

* It was Rago, not Hine, who accepted my work for publication.