Unfortunately, the position is now "temporarily suspended."
From what I could gather online, people argued that poetry is a luxury. Who wants to pay a poet's travel expenses and stipend when there's a recession going on? With money tight, sparing cash for a poet to visit schools and community centers is a tough sell.
Today, I'm sharing a poem by Sam Green about the act of writing poetry.
If it was hard, physical (dare I say taxing?) work, would you still do it?
If You Had to
If you had to make the quill
pen in the old way, stripping
the feathers, cutting the well,
splitting & shearing the tip
off clean; if you had to grind
the ink, holding the cake
straight against the stone,
circling until your wrist ached
to get the proper tone of black;
In the age of instant cut and paste, Green seems to ask, do we still honor our poems with effort? And, in light of his PL position being in limbo, how do we convince the general public that funding our art form is worth the effort?
You might also like Green's poem "Night Dive" at the Poetry Foundation-- it reminds me of after-dark lake swims in the summer.
I'm off to the ocean tomorrow. Dip into more Poetry Friday posts at Language, Literacy, Love. Breanne is hosting the round-up this week.
