A Blossoming Population of Poets

"We're going kind of poet-laureate crazy," former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins told a Canadian newspaper recently, marveling that he'd met a young boy who'd been named poet laureate of his middle school. The laureates range from some of the literary lights of the age to, as one poet critic said, "some cousin of the governor's wife."

McElveen, executive director of the Alexandria Bar Association, envisions organizing readings and contests and helping school children and seniors compose their own verses. She said she might hand out fliers with poems at the farmer's market in Old Town. Or have poems printed on postcards and put at city coffee shops and restaurants. One thing she'd really like to do is start an annual Robert Burns dinner, celebrating the city's Scottish heritage by honoring the famed Scottish poet.

Still, she said, "I don't exactly know what I'm going to do."

She's at work on a poem city officials commissioned for the April 10 kickoff of National Poetry Month. Something about the river flowing like an e.e. cummings poem and traffic flowing down Washington Boulevard in iambic pentameter -- "Stop start. Stop start."

Berger, Takoma Park's laureate, is a published poet and teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland. Like the U.S. poet laureate, he was asked to take on a project to promote poetry in the community. He receives a $1,000 honorarium for his two-year appointment and has a budget of $500, most of which has gone to providing refreshments at the monthly poetry reading series he organized.

He wrote the poem "City Forever" to commemorate the opening of a municipal center, and it includes this passage:

Gathering places, figures

Named again and brought from earlier,

Frame church in a field at Piney Branch,

Pamela Favorite, and Favorite's Store,

The streetcar at Wildwood, Our Lady of Sorrows,

White elephants and firetraps,

Joseph Colea's Progress Market--

In his final act, he's going to take lines of poetry he's collected in the community -- such as "My daughter next to me making a wand" and "Do you really think I'm primitive?" -- and string them together in one, large communal poem to be published on the city's Web site. "I'm going to use every line I got," Berger said.

The District's Kendrick, an award-winning and nationally recognized poet is the city's second laureate, appointed in 1999 after the death of Sterling Brown, who had served as laureate since 1984.

Her office is in the city's Commission on Arts and Humanities building, and her sizable budget helps promote poetry projects, such as Poetry in the Workplace, where she brings major poets into city offices to do readings. She also holds Poets in Progress workshops for budding poets and presides over annual poet laureate awards for high school students.

Last month, she brought up-and-coming poet A. Van Jordan to read at Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's office. In a letter to Kendrick, Fenty wrote, "We are an energetic group and rarely slow down long enough to welcome poetry into our lives," and that Kendrick had "borne a cherished moment and a lasting memory."

And though she has written poems for the ill-fated City Museum and had poems engraved into a sculpture on Ninth Street and at a Metro station, that momentary connection to the sacred, Kendrick said, is why cities and states need poets laureate. "Poetry will leave a residue of thought," she said. "It can take you into the spiritual side of yourself that we often do not take time for."

The poetry world is of two minds when it comes to the burgeoning of local laureates. Some poets and critics praise the visibility but worry that some of the lesser lights might be giving poetry a bad name.

"I believe in Little League. I think it's great that kids are out there everyday slugging away. But not everyone is invited to play in the major leagues," said Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets.

But much as baseball is popular because people play, the same is becoming true of poetry, said Lee Briccetti, executive director of Poets House in New York. "A lot more people are playing," he said.

About 2,100 poetry books are published each year, compared with about 200 for the whole of the 1940s, Briccetti said. Poetry slams, rap, public projects that put poems on buses and in subways and the proliferation of creative writing programs contribute to the rise of poetry. And the call for laureates.