blueprints

Introduction | xv
eat first and which after. Arts administration, it turns out, can be surprisingly
intimate work.
Eventually, I asked Patrick if I could set up a series showcasing the English
department’s graduate students, and though we students mostly had no
books to sell, he not only assented but also attended those readings religiously.
In the world of the hand-sold book, small, independent stores create
their own communities around the collective love of the word. Suddenly, we
fledgling poets and fiction writers had access to an already-established audience
of people committed to that love, and to spreading it, who received us
with a generosity of spirit I have trouble believing even now.
It was at these readings that I first met G. Barnes, who eventually brought
me on as an intern and then a paid assistant in the Utah Arts Council’s
(UAC) Literature Program (now ably run by Guy Lebeda, official wrangler
of the poet laureate of Utah). For almost three years, I traveled the state with
him, bringing poetry and prose to large towns and cow towns, to colleges
and art galleries and barbecues and primary and secondary schools. Susan
Boskoff, now the director of the Nevada Arts Council and a member of this
book’s Toolkit group, was then directing the council’s Performing Arts Tour;
she was instrumental in its (to me visionary) move to include poets and writers
on the roster along with musicians and other kinds of performers.
What I think I mean to tell you is that once you get started on this kind
of work, you don’t stop, at least not until it has chewed you up and spit you
out, which it hasn’t me, not yet (though at times, like all of us, I feel a little
gnawed around the edges). After the UAC I became a professor, but all
along I have stayed close to the work of bringing poetry to larger audiences,
by directing reading series, serving as president of Writers at Work,
creating projects as Utah’s poet laureate, and now working at the Poetry
Foundation. It’s work that feels as important and urgent as writing poems. I
think I’m like Patrick, in that I want to be read to, to encounter poems in
the right conditions for receiving them, a desire that has sometimes required
me to create those conditions myself. As Tree Swenson said in one of our
Toolkit meetings, “I realized if I didn’t do it, nobody would.” But I also
want to be in the presence of others receiving poetry, to be able to watch
Patrick close his eyes and smile at a line.
This is the call to which all of the essayists collected here, as well as the
members of the Toolkit group, responded. When they asked the question,
“Who will do it?” a single answer presented itself: “I will.” Because they all
then went on to fashion, further, or make visible programs that are unusu-