A Blossoming Population of Poets
Cities Big and Small Add Laureates to Influence Local Arts

By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 11, 2007

At the founding of the United States, John Adams wrote that he had to study politics and war so his sons could study mathematics, commerce and geography. Their practical dedication would then give the next generation a right to study poetry.

Judging by the number of local laureates, Washington area poets are taking up the call.

On March 1, Mary McElveen became the City of Alexandria's first official poet laureate, with a $500 stipend and $3,000 budget for her three-year appointment. She joined Don Berger, who a few years ago became Takoma Park's first official poet laureate.

The District's laureate, Dolores Kendrick, has her own office, a $10,000 annual budget and a $12,000 annual stipend. Virginia and Maryland have laureates, too.

In the past five years, cities, counties and even one-stoplight villages, in the Washington area and across the continent, have been appointing poets laureate.

What's going on? Is the time ripe, as Adams predicted, for a full flowering of American literary culture? Did city officials attend the same promote-the-arts workshop? Or is this an official response to the darkness of the times?

"There's been a renewed interest in poetry since 9/11," said Doris Stengel, head of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. "In the face of terrible tragedy and war, I believe people seek beauty and meaning to life, which poetry can provide."

Ludwig P. Gaines, an Alexandria City Council member who proposed the local laureate idea -- and favors poets of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote poetry in college -- said he thought it would be "an absolutely cool thing."

His idea was embraced by the council, which unanimously chose McElveen, 58, an unpublished poet, former chemistry teacher and corporate trainer, because they liked her ideas and poems better than those of 17 others. Alexandria's honorary poet in residence, Jean Elliot, who also served as a poet laureate of Virginia, died in 1999.

The mission of the city's poet laureate, Gaines said, is to promote literary arts and raise the visibility of poetry. There will be celebratory poems and readings for city events, festivals and parades. But at its heart, he said, the laureate's role is to solidify a sense of community.

"Poetry can give voice to our emotions in a way that regular dialogue can't capture," Gaines said. "We are seeing our society and our localities looking inward. I think having a poet laureate may be an expression of that introspection on a very public level."

Some of McElveen's poems, such as "Thoughts at the Gas Station," are meditations on modern life:

I fill my tank;

The dashboard display shows this fuel will take me

Three hundred seventy-four miles.

A hundred eighty-seven miles

To Somewhere Else and back

Or nine back-and-forths to work,

With

Assorted errands.

Towns big and small seem to want poets laureate. San Francisco, Brooklyn, N.Y., Denver, Duluth, Minn., and Toronto have their own local bards, as do Point Arena, Calif., Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and Lancaster County, Pa.

Santa Fe, N.M., pays its laureate $5,000 a year through private donations. Three Oaks, Mich., expects theirs to compose something special for Flag Day. Boston is looking for one. And applications are now being accepted for a laureate to laud Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

"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.