There's No Money in Poetry, But There's No Poetry in Money, Either*
You know what funds a lot of the poetry in America right now? Drug money.
Let's back up.
The Poetry Foundation not only publishes the august Poetry magazine but issues poetry apps and gives out poetry awards and partners with PBS and NPR and generally does all it can to promote verse in the modern American consciousness. How can it afford to do all that? Thank Ruth Lilly.
Ms. Lilly's graddad established a little company called Eli Lilly, the people who first brought us mass quantities of the polio vaccine and insulin. She was also a would-be poet who tried and failed to publish her lines in Poetry magazine. In 2002 she bequeathed more than $100 million to the publication, no doubt leading its editors to wonder how much they might have gotten if they'd accepted her poems. (These days Eli Lilly makes most of its money from drugs like Prozac, so if you believe the persistent rumors of a connection between poetic genius and depression, the company is doing its best to extinguish verse.)
Needless to say, having all that money and the media access it buys has made the Poetry Foundation the 800-pound gorilla of the poetry world. Recently the foundation has come under fire for not supporting non-Caucasian poets and issuing what they considered an too-tepid statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The criticism led the foundation's president and board chairman to resign. This is unlikely to satisfy the protesters. They want serious changes. In an open letter, they wrote:
Ultimately, we dream of a world in which the massive wealth hoarding that underlies the foundation’s work would be replaced by the redistribution of every cent to those whose labor amassed those funds.
In other words: Reparations! Or, some would doubtless say: Communism! But a person with a fondness for terrible puns might call it nothing but...poetic justice.
(sorry not sorry)
* quoth Robert Graves
Let's back up.
The Poetry Foundation not only publishes the august Poetry magazine but issues poetry apps and gives out poetry awards and partners with PBS and NPR and generally does all it can to promote verse in the modern American consciousness. How can it afford to do all that? Thank Ruth Lilly.
Ms. Lilly's graddad established a little company called Eli Lilly, the people who first brought us mass quantities of the polio vaccine and insulin. She was also a would-be poet who tried and failed to publish her lines in Poetry magazine. In 2002 she bequeathed more than $100 million to the publication, no doubt leading its editors to wonder how much they might have gotten if they'd accepted her poems. (These days Eli Lilly makes most of its money from drugs like Prozac, so if you believe the persistent rumors of a connection between poetic genius and depression, the company is doing its best to extinguish verse.)
Needless to say, having all that money and the media access it buys has made the Poetry Foundation the 800-pound gorilla of the poetry world. Recently the foundation has come under fire for not supporting non-Caucasian poets and issuing what they considered an too-tepid statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. The criticism led the foundation's president and board chairman to resign. This is unlikely to satisfy the protesters. They want serious changes. In an open letter, they wrote:
Ultimately, we dream of a world in which the massive wealth hoarding that underlies the foundation’s work would be replaced by the redistribution of every cent to those whose labor amassed those funds.
In other words: Reparations! Or, some would doubtless say: Communism! But a person with a fondness for terrible puns might call it nothing but...poetic justice.
* quoth Robert Graves
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