blueprints

158 | alison hawthorne deming
If a place isn’t careful, it can become a caricature of itself, falling for a
canned version of its history that leaves it bereft of whole categories of collective
experience. Tucson as “Cow Town” and Santa Fe as “Pink Coyote
Land.” A place can lose track of its story and so its future. This can happen
to literary organizations, which can sprout up like field mushrooms in the
rain and shrivel as quickly. In the twenty years I’ve lived in Tucson, I’ve seen
dozens of journals, reading series, community workshops, and writers’
groups form and dissolve. A few have sustained. This is not a surprise: artistic
affiliation follows the patterns of growth, connection, and decay that
cycle through nature and culture. Life spans vary; dynamism is all. Looking
over the past fifty years of the Poetry Center’s history, I can’t help but marvel
at its constancy through periods of institutional distraction, fiscal insecurity,
aesthetic contentiousness, the tired jabs at “academic poets” (as if
such a category could be defined and remain so from 1960 to 2010), the
privatization of public education, and the call for arts audience development
in the age of entertainment.
What has carried us through all this weather, so that we begin our second
fifty years standing in the breezeway of an artful new building that is
the fulfillment of a long collective dream in this community, spawning a
wealth of programs serving diverse audiences and building a living archive
of poetry, photographs, and recordings of more than one thousand readings
hosted by the Center since 1961? “Why here?” we ask, even those of us
closest to the life of the Poetry Center, why here in the arid and malled
landscape of desert and Sunbelt sprawl? What key values shaped the Center
and might serve others who wish to create something in their own communities
that says poetry matters?
The Poetry Center was established on an aesthetic idea passionately
held by founder, poet, novelist, and editor Ruth Walgreen Stephan—“to
maintain and cherish the spirit of poetry.” When she spoke of the spirit of
poetry, she meant not the art’s ethereal aspect that “makes nothing happen”
but rather the animating force that lends strength and purpose to individuals
and movements. “Poetry,” she wrote, “is the food of the spirit, and spirit
is the instigator and flow of all revolutions, whether political or personal,
whether national, worldwide, or within the life of a single quiet human
being.” She spent winters in the 1950s writing in a rented cottage near the
university campus. In 1960, she bought this cottage and an adjoining lot,
donating them on the same day to the university to launch the Poetry Center.
In her Connecticut home, she had a small poetry room, and she noticed