Fanny Howe

James Stone Goodman, a St. Louis poet and rabbi, sent the Post-Dispatch the following essay about National Poetry Month and poetry benefactor Ruth Lilly. As it happens, this year’s winner of the Ruth Lilly award was announced today, April 14. She is Fanny Howe. (For more information, see www.poetryfoundation.org) For more by Goodman, go to his blog. Thanks to Goodman for this essay (although maybe in his next one he can tell us how to get more poetry from or in the news).

By James Stone Goodman

I’m reminded as I write this that we are entering April, poetry month, knowing with T.S. Eliot that April is the coolest month, here it’s usually hot. Still poetry is what we live for; it’s what we need from the news, though it’s difficult to get poetry from the news. NBC news I see is looking for some good news because I am sure they think that will sell cars better. It’s poetry that sells cars, anyone who has read William Carlos Williams knows this. How much depends upon a red wheel barrow, well, you know a car can carry so much more.

Still I am suffering every day for lack of what is found there, the news, good news anyway. I am so glad NBC is lightening up and I am encouraged by the building of tree houses in Washington, D.C. and other examples of colloquial goodness. Now we can all be lifted up by the news, but it’s not poetry.

Ruth Lilly, great grandchild of Eli Lilly who made his fortune in pharmaceuticals, gave poetry the biggest boost in years with a gift to Poetry magazine of 100 million dollars (this to a publication that wouldn’t publish her own poetry). Poetry magazine used to pay two dollars a line for poems, but none to Ruth Lilly who submitted poem after poem under a name no one would recognize, posted from Indianapolis. That’s what I call healthy detachment. It’s all about the work, Ms. Lilly said. Her work wasn’t up to Poetry magazine’s standard, it might have been if they knew she had her pen poised on that 100 million dollar Eli Lilly pharmaceutically pure check. The great way is not difficult to one with no expectations, not since the 7th century Zen Patriarch Sengcan has anyone demonstrated so little expectation as the philanthropic Ruth Lilly posting anonymously from Indiana. I think about her whenever my poems are rejected, the rejection part not the 100 million dollars part.

 Harriet Monroe, poet (she rhymed most of the time) and onetime critic for the Chicago Tribune, founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1912, not long after returning from a trip to China. The motto of the magazine was Whitman’s line “To have great poets there must be great audiences too.” In its early days, Poetry promoted the Imagists, poets such as Ezra Pound, H.D., T.S. Eliot, and scores of other initialists. “These poets have bowed to winds from the East,” she wrote. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by the then unknown T.S. Eliot was published in Poetry in 1915.

 Poetry magazine got a face-lift with a hundred million bucks and it looks a heck of a lot better than it used to. It is a lean and dignified publication. Probably nothing published in it will bring down the Empire, it’s thirty five dollars a year which takes a chunk out of a good poet’s budget since hardly anyone can make a living as a poet these days (unless you win the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize which is $100,000, big in the poetry world but still not enough to put down on a decent house in San Francisco where poets once lived before Citibank).

That’s what I long for, not just a poetry month, a poetry decade, and a city of poets, and the ascendance of the poet as a guy or gal who can make an honest living taking down the priests, kings, and even the prophets with heuristic revolutionary verse.

Here I go with a lunch pail a pocket full of pencils and a coffee house to hang out in, I’m going to work — to parse the world, praise the word, squeeze it for what it means, make it mean when it doesn’t. Ruth Lilly, you’re my hero, in April poetry month anyway, because you had a 100 million dollars to give away and you gave it to a magazine that hardly anyone reads featuring a form few practice, to some snobs in Chicago that wouldn’t even take your own product (poetry that is, not drugs).