BLUEPRINTS BLUE PRINTS The University of Utah Press •Salt Lake City The Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, Poetry Foundation •Chicago BLUE PRINTS Bringing Poetry into Communities Edited by KATHARINE COLES Copyright © 2011 by The Poetry Foundation. All rights reserved. Blueprints is a copublication of the Poetry Foundation and the University of Utah Press. “One Heart at a Time: The Creation of Poetry Out Loud” © 2011 by Dana Gioia and The Poetry Foundation. All rights reserved. Excerpts from Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brook- lyn, and Other Identities copyright © 1993, 1997 by Anna Deveare Smith and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 copyright © 2003 by Anna Deveare Smith. Reprinted courtesy of the author. This material may not be published, performed, or used in any way without the written permission of the author. The Defiance House Man colophon is a registered trademark of the University of Utah Press. It is based upon a four-foot-tall, Ancient Puebloan pictograph (late PIII) near Glen Canyon, Utah. 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blueprints : bringing poetry to communities / edited by Katharine Coles. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-60781-147-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Poetry—Programmed instruction. 2. Poetry—Social aspects. 3. Poetry—tudy and teaching. I. Coles, Katharine. PN1031.B57 2011 808.1—dc22 2011002347 CONTENTS vii AckNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION Katharine Coles SECTION I ALIVE IN THE WOR(L)D: WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO 3 THE FLYWHEEL: On the Relationship between Poetry and Its Audience—Poetry International Bas Kwakman 14 THE SECOND THROAT: Poetry Slam Patricia Smith 27 CONVERGING WOR[L]DS: Nizhoni Bridges and Southwest Native Communities Sherwin Bitsui 36 THE WORD BECOMES YOU Anna Deavere Smith SECTION II COMMUNITY AND BACK: POETRY IN DIALOGUE 57 TIA CHUCHA COMES HOME: Poetry, Community, and a Crazy Aunt—Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore Luis Rodriguez 70 WE WERE HERE, AND WE ARE HERE: The Cave Canem Poetry Workshop Elizabeth Alexander vi | Contents 77 AbOUT RIVER OF WORDS Robert Hass 114 THE POEM IS A BRIDGE: Poetry@Tech Thomas Lux SECTION III DRAWING BREATH: PROGRAMS AT LARGE AND AT HOME 129 THE THREE GOAT STORY: Notes on Poetry and Diplomacy— University of Iowa International Writing Program Christopher Merrill 141 ONE HEART AT A TIME: The Creation of Poetry Out Loud Dana Gioia 156 PEOPLE, HABITAT, POETRY: The University of Arizona Poetry Center Alison Hawthorne Deming 170 A PLACE FOR POETRY: Building Models for Poetry Programming in Communities—Poets House Lee Briccetti SECTION IV APPRENTICE YOURSELF: A TOOLKIT FOR POETRY PROGRAMMERS Katharine Coles, Susan Boskoff, Tree Swenson, Orlando White, and Elizabeth Allen 195 PART 1. AN IDEA, A PENCIL, AND PAPER: Tools for Practical Dreaming 215 PART 2. HAMMER, SAW, AND NAILS: Tools for Framing 234 PART 3. SANDPAPER, WALLPAPER, AND PAINT: Finishing Tools for the Event Itself 274 PART 4. BENT NAILS AND SHORT BOARDS: When Something Goes Wrong—And It Will 285 PART 5. NUTS, BOLTS, AND WIDGETS: Tools for Tinkering 295 CONTRIBUTORS AckNOWLEDGMENTS The Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute would like to extend its deepest gratitude to all of the essayists and toolkit members who participated in the Poetry in Communities project, as well as the following people to whom the project owes its gratitude: Glenda Cotter and her colleagues at the Uni- versity of Utah Press, Rachel Berchten, Douglas B. Borwick, Stephanie Hlywak, Pamela Michael, Lily Sutton, Kathleen White, and Lily Whitsitt. vii INTRODUCTION Blueprints Katharine Coles When I became the inaugural director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry In- stitute in 2009, I was handed a pile of some two hundred questionnaires. These had been generously filled out and returned by poets, teachers, scholars, readers, and others in response to the Poetry Foundation’s efforts to assess the needs of the poetry community in preparation for getting the Institute up and running. The responses came from around the country and from communities large and small, affluent and struggling. Being a poet and therefore perhaps naturally suspicious of efforts to enumerate anything about or around the art, I approached these question- naires at first with some hesitation. But I was struck both by the openheart- edness, passion, and hope reflected in the responses and by the way certain important themes kept emerging in them. People who are already passion- ate about poetry—and our numbers are large and growing—feel power- fully that poetry fulfills an essential human need, that it provides a source of richness and pleasure that nobody should be without, and, therefore, that poetry should be readily and widely available to everyone. ix x | Katharine Coles Which, as many of our respondents rightly point out, it is not. Cer- tainly, as they recognize, there are successful poetry programs being run across the country and around the world by committed people at every level, from the extremely local to the national to the international. Many are to some extent happy with the liveliness of their own poetry communi- ties. But they also see—and are pained to acknowledge—that they are, almost by definition, among the fortunate few. Many of them are poets, teachers, or scholars living in academic communities; all are in some way in touch with the Poetry Foundation and its programs and are aware of and making use of other excellent programs as well, both in and beyond their own communities. They are also acutely sensitive to the fact that what pro- grams they have access to are often precarious, depending on the commit- ment sometimes of a single dedicated person and funders who themselves are endangered by hard economic realities. As our respondents observe, these excellent programs tend to exist in pockets; there are still far too many gaps in what we might, with tongues in cheeks, call poetry-related services. If they may seem difficult to fill for ordinary American poetry lovers who perceive that something vital is miss- ing from their neighborhoods, it shouldn’t surprise us that these gaps feel impossible to overcome in the far corners of the Navajo Nation or for aid workers in Somalian refugee camps. In spite of the urgency of the need many of us perceive, and in spite of the many very fine programs out there, people tend to feel that it is almost overwhelmingly difficult to get good programs up and running, especially in communities that are geographi- cally or economically isolated or otherwise disadvantaged. People know that resources and expertise exist, but they are not sure how to gain access to them. They perceive both an absence of effective networking among poetry programmers and a lack of practical support. They understand that there is knowledge out there to share, but they do not think they have the ability to access or leverage knowledge and resources within and across communities and programs. This is the case even though every generation of poets and poetry lov- ers who see gaps in poetry offerings in their communities faces essentially the same set of questions, the first being simply “How and where do I start?” Thus, these programmers also face the persistent obligation to reinvent wheels that have been invented over and over again elsewhere—whether “elsewhere” is up the block or on the other side of the country. Introduction | xi Our question, then, was “How can we help?” This book, we hope, pro- vides one answer. Here, a dozen people—mostly poets themselves, all inti- mately involved with the arts—who have done important work bringing poetry into communities of different sizes and kinds, offer narratives and insights about their experiences. Their mandate was to identify important moments—of initiation, of crisis, of growth—in the development of their projects or organizations, then tell us how they met those moments. In par- ticular, we asked them to tell us how their decisions arose out of the values that drove them to create and maintain their programs in the first place. These essays make up the heart of the book and are meant to provide both inspiration and guidance. Each one connects the hard work of poetry programming with the moments of passion, revelation, and inspiration that make the work of programming worthwhile. And each has something to say about why and how poetry becomes important to communities of var- ious kinds by connecting community members with one another, with their places, and with themselves. The second half of the book, A Toolkit for Poetry Programmers, pro- vides systematic, hands-on, practical advice and resources for those working to found new programs or to sustain or transform existing programs. Don’t know how to become a nonprofit? The Toolkit provides websites and other resources that will help you. Don’t know what a board is or how to get one going? Again, both advice and resources are here. Forgotten why you ever wanted to do this often thankless work in the first place? The Toolkit pro- vides advice for remaining connected to your own values and inspiration, for finding your way back to those moments and experiences that first con- vinced you that the power of poetry exists not only for the solitary reader under the lamp but for those who come together to read it, hear it, recite it, study and write it, and discuss it together, in community. I come to this project with my own sense of what a community, and therefore individuals, might be missing when poetry is absent. When I was an undergraduate, studying first to be an actor and a poet and then finally just to be a poet, I would speak with my parents every Sunday.