blueprints

152 | dana gioia
can cost-effectively develop materials that no local program can afford. For
Poetry Out Loud, the Arts Endowment and the Poetry Foundation created
beautifully designed and produced posters, teacher’s guides, audio CDs, and
eventually DVDs. American culture is celebrity driven. Celebrities give
programs or products visibility and credibility, especially among teenagers
who have grown up in a media-saturated society. To demonstrate the broad
appeal of poetry, the NEA approached well-known actors with a passion
for the art—Anthony Hopkins, James Earl Jones, Alyssa Milano, Alfred
Molina. We matched them with well-known writers, including Richard
Rodriguez, N. Scott Momaday, Rita Dove, Kay Ryan, David Mason, and
David Henry Hwang. We then recorded both groups reciting favorite
poems. The purpose of the “audio guide” was both to communicate the
pleasures of the art and to provide diverse models for effective performance.
As the program developed, we also filmed some of the national finalists to
illustrate the wide variety of successful approaches to poetic recitation.
Meanwhile, at the Poetry Foundation, Stephen Young led the development
of a classroom anthology for the competition. The book, which he
and Dan Stone edited, included 114 poems, carefully selected to present a
diverse range of themes, styles, historical periods, and cultural traditions.
The Poetry Foundation supplemented the printed anthology with a website
containing approximately four hundred selections. Gradually this online
anthology has grown to seven hundred poems, providing contestants and
instructors with an enticing range of possibilities for every level of the
competition.
In creating an enduring public enterprise, validation fosters validation.
Any new venture must successfully display the standards by which it wants
to be judged. In developing the national finals, we carefully crafted a series
of public events that would support the program’s visibility and importance.
They had to hold their own in Washington, a city crowded with exceedingly
well-executed public programs. The final events also needed to appeal
to multiple constituencies—students, poets, teachers, politicians, and the
press. Poetry has become such a specialized activity in our society that some
literati might doubt that an inclusive and exciting public event can be created
without dumbing everything down. The Poetry Out Loud finals have
demonstrated that a compelling and artistically rich event can be created for
a general audience. Special care each year has gone into selecting a diverse,
distinguished panel of judges, which has included Garrison Keillor, Azar
Nafisi, Tyne Daly, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, and Natasha Trethewey.