Late in 2002, Chicago-based Poetry magazine and its parent organization, the Modern Poetry Association, or MPA, announced that the association was to receive an estimated $100-million to $150-million bequest from Ruth Lilly, 87, heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune.
The bequest created a certain stupefaction, and not just among the boards of Poetry and the MPA. Upon hearing the news, many commentators and self-styled culture czars put pen to paper and finger to keyboard to celebrate, muse and snipe about this extraordinary windfall.
As any reader of fairy tales knows, gifts can be double-edged: They can bring delight but also difficulties. Writer Lewis Hyde years ago made clear in his book “The Gift” that a gift is an offering and a burden: It binds you, obligates you, ensnares you, even if–as in the case of the Lilly bequest–it promises to make things possible.
Speaking on behalf of the MPA, President Deborah Cummins, and Joseph Parisi, executive director and editor of Poetry magazine, seem grateful and cautious, mindful of the double nature of the gift.
“We recognize the true responsibility as well as the good fortune of the bequest,” Cummins says. “We want to be cautious and precise in all regards; and this will require a lot more planning than people understand.”
Adds Parisi: “The legal, financial [issues] . . . all have to be thought about simultaneously; and meanwhile the magazine has to come out every month. We have to think about all these things in an integrated way.”
Parisi emphasizes that the bequest “will be coming in installments over thirty years, and . . . is going to be used to form an endowment.” Cummins adds that “one of the clarifications that needs to be made is that the bequest went to the Modern Poetry Association, not to the magazine, though obviously Poetry magazine is our most prominent face.”
People in the poetry community are, of course, eager to know what will be done with the money. While emphasizing that it will take some time to decide on every allocation, Cummins also says, “we look to partnering as a way of helping our mission. Are there people out there doing some of the same things we would like to do?”
Indeed, there may be: The several poets, publishers, editors, educators and association directors we interviewed made many suggestions as unofficial consultants, and a number of their ideas converged: support for education, support for public programming, support for poets, support for publishing. Here is a selection of their musings, congratulations, criticism and advice–an informal roundtable about the Lilly bequest:
Julie Parson-Nesbitt
Member of the editorial board of Tia Chucha Press in Chicago and her local school council in Chicago
“We need to reach new audiences for poetry. This is an amazing time for poetry in this country–a lot of young people are into poetry now. This has a lot to do with hip-hop.
“We need models to motivate kids to read and write. Teachers need curricula, support, programs in the schools. I work with Young Chicago Authors, an 11-year-old Chicago organization that provides creative-writing workshops in Chicago public schools. This might be a model.
“I hope [the Modern Poetry Association] will work with other literary organizations and literary programs, because I feel that the literary community is pretty small and interdependent. There is a critical lack of poetry publishing in this country. One thing they could consider is publishing poetry books of their own and supporting other presses. I would love to see a lot of collaboration between Poetry magazine and other organizations in Chicago and nationwide–after all, they have a national readership.”
Devin Johnston
Poet and co-publisher of Flood Editions, a small press in Chicago
“Whatever comes of the bequest, you can bet it will produce another prize. Mother, save us from the redundancy of prizes! They rarely seem to go to anyone who needs them; and as someone once said, prizes are for children.
“I do hope that some of that money gets scattered in small disbursements to shoestring operations. Historically, the Midwest has not had the institutional support for poetry that one finds in cities like New York or San Francisco. Poetry could help in that regard.
“More importantly, Poetry could give grants to poets on the basis of economic need rather than accomplishment. Provision might be made for poets without health insurance or retirement savings. I can think of only one organization in the United States specifically addressed to poets who find themselves in an emergency, such as fire, flood, eviction, or medical crisis: Poets in Need, at 2639 Russell St., Berkeley, CA 94705.”
Rebecca Wolff
Poet, editor of the literary and arts magazine Fence, and publisher of Fence Books in New York
“I can imagine that if it happened to me, it would take a long time to figure out what to do with it. Maybe they can take that money and make a little think tank, to think about their editorial policy.
“One reason poetry’s become a kind of rockpool is because it’s not part of the curriculum of early learning. It seems that earlier–in my mother’s education–poetry was central to learning language, how to speak; she can still recite some of them at length. A sense of poetry as something you could use in your daily life seems to have disappeared . . . so if someone gave me a hundred million and I was already established as a foundation, I think I would do something to promote the early learning of poetry. There are projects like that but nothing concerted.
“In the grant-giving world there are very few funding opportunities for publishing because people have decided that poetry should be able to support itself, that it’s a business. . . . It’s probably a lot easier to get grants for performance things and visual stuff.”
Haki Madhubuti
Poet, educator and publisher of Third World Press in Chicago
“The first thing is not to do anything–take the money and bank it and think very seriously about what to do with it.
“Second thing: Give the staff and editors a raise. Men and women who work in this field are terribly underpaid.
“Third: A deep thank you needs to be issued loud and clear to the grantor.
“Fourth: Reach out to other communities. I read Poetry every month; I’m not a subscriber, I just buy it off the shelf. This is a problem we [as publishers and poets] all have–we don’t have the resources to reach other communities with our poetry, with our words. Poetry magazine should be on all the shelves in all the libraries in the country–not just in Chicago or in New York but in rural areas, high schools, in historically black colleges.
“Fifth: I’d suggest that they talk to a financial adviser. . . . At Third World Press one of the things we did 15 years ago was to buy property on the South Side of Chicago. Poetry has very small office space at the Newberry Library.
“Sixth: Consider publishing poetry books.
“It’s not like they have to reinvent the wheel–they already invented the wheel with Poetry magazine.”
Eirik Steinhoff
Editor of the quarterly literary magazine
Chicago Review
“I will say off the bat that there are more important things than all this fiddle to be redistributing wealth towards: education, health care, social services, and so on. That said, I also recognize the value of cultural capital, and the part, though small, that poetry plays in that game.
“Whenever poetry–the genre, not the magazine–is the target of large-scale philanthropic gestures, it’s a good sign. In my experience, philanthropists are an incredibly competitive bunch, and it takes gestures like Lilly’s to cultivate and innovate new areas of philanthropic attention. If this were the intention, though, the gift might have been framed as a challenge grant–i.e., 50 percent from Lilly, 50 percent from other sources. ‘Matching funds’ is how the [National Endowment for the Arts] frames it.
“It’s a good thing that the money goes to an organization in Chicago, putting this city back on the map, at least in national news, as a cultural center. Much more significant than the Lilly gift, to my mind, are the numerous, home-grown, non-institutional poetry-reading series that are afoot–in the last two years we’ve been lucky to have The Danny’s Reading Series, the Chicago Poetry Project, and something just called the Discrete Series just opened up recently. This is much more significant than millions of dollars, insofar as it indicates that there’s a lively poetry scene, one that’s burgeoning away from the universities, one that is basically free of charge. The Lilly millions are just gravy on top, really. You need the poetry first!
“It’s a terrible thing for all this money to go to just one organization. For the MPA to be the sole recipient of this gift is more than a little troubling, if only because it will allow Poetry magazine to take the millions as a confirmation of the conservative turn that the magazine has taken under Parisi–a turn that in fact betrays the innovative legacy of editorial ecumenicism that the magazine had in two important moments in the 20th Century: in the heyday of the moderns–under founding Editor Harriet Monroe–and in the thick thrill of the postwar generations under the brilliant Henry Rago. Poetry travels a much narrower circuit than it should for a magazine with such a legacy, publishing average verse by average poets, which it will now be distributing to a much larger public. Perhaps this bequest will allow the much-touted ‘open-door’ editorial policy to kick into action again, but none of us is holding our breath for that.”
Marc Kelly Smith
Chicago performance poet, founder of the National Poetry Slam and slam host at the Green Mill lounge
“It would be nice to have some money in the slam world, and we could really do something! We reach a giant audience–slammers are in the schools teaching. I don’t think it’s a boast for me to say that Poetry Slam is one of the major forces in heightening audience awareness of poetry.
“There are other groups in Chicago–Young Chicago Authors, for example–and in Illinois that are doing all kinds of work out there, just doing it out of their love of the art. Alice George of Rhino magazine has been plugging away for years. The Guild Complex [which runs arts programming and houses Tia Chucha Press]–they still operate on a shoestring.
“The Slam and Poetry magazine–their roots–they’re both revolutionary outfits, only Poetry magazine moved from revolution to institution years ago. . . . [But] I’ve got a feeling that they might do really great things with [the bequest].”
Alice Quinn
Executive director of the Poetry Society of America, or PSA, and poetry editor of The New Yorker
“I still consider libraries to be the great waterway [for poetry]. But if you can bring the programming that we do at PSA to other parts of the country, that would be a great thing. I strongly believe in having poetry be the anchor of the evening [of a special event] but welcoming other arts into it.
“Poets’ House [in New York City] and PSA came together to talk to foundations; we realized that we’d be stronger together. If Poetry magazine wanted to join forces with us, that would be heaven!”
Poetry shouldn’t be in isolation; it should live in the world.”
William Corbett
Poet, teacher and publisher of Pressed Wafer, a small press in Boston
“I consider this money like gravy–you spread it around like fertilizer; don’t worry about making mistakes. Stay lean and put the money out to work. Be bold, be generous.
“Put a healthy chunk aside for indigent poets. . . . Spread [the money] around–but not by creating another bureaucracy, another publishing organization. Give not to institutions but to poets.
“One thing they could do is buy a hell of a lot of books for libraries–subsidize libraries on Native American reservations, in inner cities, etc.
“What’s money good for? The same thing it’s good for a plumber for: more wine, more food. . . . [The bequest] won’t make one . . . bit of difference: The poems will get written or they won’t. Like Ezra Pound said, it doesn’t matter who writes the good poems, only that they get written.”
