Tim Peterson sent me an email on the Boston question(s) as well, which, after asking his permission, I posted only to find a second email telling me that he’d changed his mind, so I took it down – the ghost blog effect, I guess. But one thing that Tim’s email did was make me realize that I needed to be more clear in my use of the term tiering to describe literary scenes.

 

I have what I would call a loose structural definition of tiering. A first tier metro – and as I noted, I see only two in the U.S. – is so active & diverse that the loss of one or more major poetry institutions would not cause the scene itself to dissipate. If, for example, San Francisco were to lose the impact of the writing program at San Francisco State or New College or Small Press Traffic or Small Press Distribution, the scene itself would survive largely in tact. The same goes for New York if, say, the Poetry Project were to close up shop. Even though each would be a true loss – and the demise of SPD would have national, maybe even global implications – the poetry scene of the community is not dependent upon it.

 

Most typically, second tier scenes can be nearly as lively as first tier ones, but tend to be much more dependent on one or two institutions without which they could not thrive. The writing program at UC San Diego, the Writers Workshop in Iowa City, Kelly Writers House & the writing program at Temple in Philadelphia are essential to those literary scenes. Interestingly – perhaps even counterintuitively – American Poetry Review is not such a player in Philly. Rather like City Lights in San Francisco, it has a big reputation & very little real impact.

 

But there are other second-tier scenes, or maybe I should say scenes that I would group with the institutionally dependent ones above that seem not to have a single dominant local institution, & generally seem to survive without one. Washington & Boston both would seem to be examples of this. There aren’t as many events going on as in New York or the Bay Areas, metros in which 150 readings in one month – five a night – is not an unusual figure. It’s always possible, for example, that a single person can substitute for a necessary institution – Bill Corbett seems to in Boston &, at one point in its history Kenneth Rexroth did likewise for SF. But it’s one of those literature-as-sociology questions worth exploring further.