blueprints

x | Katharine Coles
Which, as many of our respondents rightly point out, it is not. Certainly,
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 communities.
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 programs
they have access to are often precarious, depending on the commitment
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 missing
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 geographically
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 lovers
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.