Newspapers Find Receptive Audience for Poetry Column
Newspapers Find Receptive Audience for Poetry Column
By Barbara Bedway
Published: December 19, 2005
NEW YORK
William Carlos Williams famously wrote, "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there." Thanks to U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser and his American Life in Poetry project, poems -- a common feature of newspapers during the first half of the 20th century -- are now reaching about a million readers each week through more than 58 dailies and weeklies in this country.
Launched in April, the poetry column -- which every week features a poem chosen by Kooser and a brief introduction he also supplies -- has an alluring setup for a newspaper: The poems are short, free, and packed with meaning. Papers can choose to run them on whatever schedule suits their needs.
Tim White, opinion page editor of The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer, one of the first papers to take on the column, notes that "Kooser is going out of his way to keep it spare, so it's easy to find a corner for it." The Observer runs it on its Sunday books page. White says he appreciates that "it takes up no more room than the bestseller lists, and adds a new dimension to our pages." One further advantage: White did not need to ask the publisher's permission to run it.
Kooser, who won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for his 10th collection, Delights and Shadows, first became interested in the press pushing poetry when he rented a room as an undergraduate in Ames, Iowa, from a woman who had two fat scrapbooks of poems clipped from newspapers. He has long discussed how poetry might be reintroduced to newspapers with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, who is the editor of the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star.
He pitched his idea last year at a newspaper conference in Washington, D.C. "I talked to them for a few minutes about what I had in mind, stressing that the columns would be free, would be short, and would showcase poems that everyday readers could understand and appreciate," Kooser tells E&P. "They were quite enthusiastic."
The poets themselves -- among them, Lisel Mueller, Wendell Berry, and Naomi Shihab Nye -- are obviously gratified to be reaching a sizable audience that the Poetry Foundation (which sponsors the project with the Library of Congress and the University of Nebraska, where Kooser is a visiting professor) estimates to be about one million readers each week.
"I've received many, many messages from all over the country," relates Nye, who five years ago helped lobby her local paper, the San Antonio (Texas) Express- News, to begin printing one poem a week in "Culturas," the arts section. "The poet is paid only $20, but ... you can see that what Ted is doing is right up my alley. Put poems out there wherever you can!"
Steve Bennett, book editor at the San Antonio (Texas) Express-News, explains that the poems are picked by guest editors, usually poets or professors, who select from submissions. "I think it's very important for a major daily to support poetry, which, believe me, is far from a dying art form," he observes.
In a variation on the "all politics is local" maxim, Wanda A. Adams, book editor of The Honolulu Advertiser, prepares a local version of the project, called "Poetry in Island Life," which is published on the last Sunday of each month along with Kooser's column. It features a short, locally written poem that has previously appeared in an area literary magazine or in a poetry anthology or collection.
"In looking over his poems, I realized they all had a mainland focus," Adams points out. "We've got our own patois here, a different rhythm and syntax." She tries to choose "reader-friendly, transparent poems" that parallel what Kooser is doing, but admits the search can be daunting: "There's a fair amount of time involved in finding poems that are the right length, with no offensive language." Much of the response has come from educators and from other poets wanting the paper to use one of their poems, she notes.
Doug Peterson, assistant features editor at the Des Moines (Iowa) Register, reports a very favorable response to the Kooser column from readers. "We find that out mainly when we don't run it," he says ruefully. When he was out for two weeks with a broken wrist, the paper received about 15 calls and e-mails from people asking -- "very politely" -- when the column was going to come back.
Peterson understands how they feel. "Kooser is very good at selecting poems with a lot of emotion," he notes. "Some even make me cry. Sometimes as I edit them I'm afraid someone will walk by, ask what's wrong, and I'll have to say, 'I just read a poem.'"
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Barbara Bedway (
[email protected]) is an E&P contributor.
