blueprints

Tools for Practical Dreaming | 197
Alison Hawthorne Deming, on the other hand, tells us that she was
originally drawn to administrative work through her own powerful sense of
how community had been integral to every important moment of her
growth as a poet. A desire to bring that sense of community to others led
her to work first at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and second
at the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona.
Dana Gioia came to Poetry Out Loud through the memory of early
experiences with poetry, both at home and in school, that were natural and
embodied, not intellectualized, and a desire to re-create that experience for
young people.
Orlando White, a member of the Toolkit group, remembers how powerfully
the experience of working intensively with poets who visited Santa
Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts for weeklong residencies influenced
him as a young poet. At Diné College, he now works to create the same
kind of experience for his students.
“Values,” according to Thomas Lux, is “a good and honest word.” Notice
that, in each of these cases, a sense of values, of the importance of a certain
kind of experience, led people to a programming commitment and vision.
So, again, what experience brought you into a passionate relationship with
poetry? Can you imagine replicating that experience where you are?
On the other hand, a passion for your community and a desire to strengthen
that community may make you want to create poetry programming.
Of course, this desire isn’t necessarily separate from a passion for
poetry—in fact, it implies a belief that poetry offers something special to
those who encounter it. Susan Boskoff, a member of the Toolkit group,
directs the Nevada Arts Council and helps rural communities within
Nevada build arts programming. She feels strongly about the power of
poetry “to animate democracy, create dialogue and discourse, and bring
people together through falling in love with the sound of poems.” She
remembers her experience of “falling in love” when she lived in Utah and
was first regularly exposed to poetry readings and the way of speaking that
is unique to poetry, at once public and also personal and intimate. Mark
Strand expressed the same idea in his 1991 introduction to Best American
Poetry 1 when he said about poetry that “[W]e still depend on it in moments
of crisis and during those times when it is important that we know, in so
many words, what we are going through.”