Departments
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26 June 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 1 |
Feature
Article
Of epoch proportion
NEA gives $500,000 Millennium Grant to Pinsky's poetry project
by Eric McHenry
The Favorite Poem Project is growing to epic dimensions. A $500,000 grant announced recently by the National Endowment for the Arts will allow Robert Pinsky, CAS professor of English and U.S. poet laureate, to get production of the audio and video archive under way. It is the NEA's largest Millennium Project Award of 1998.
The money will be put to immediate use, Pinsky says, with the hiring of an executive producer for the $3.5 million project -- a high-tech, multimedia record of some 1,000 Americans reading their favorite poems aloud.
It's a far cry from Pinsky's original plan -- to have former student David Gewanter, now teaching at Georgetown University, approach people with a tape recorder.
"Getting David and some graduate students out there, and trying to catch people from around the country as they passed through Washington -- that was my first idea," Pinsky recalls with a laugh. "I think I underestimated the appeal of it."
Perhaps. His office has received over 2,500 applications to read poems for the archive, hundreds of which had come in long before the first day of April -- National Poetry Month -- when Pinsky officially announced the project. Nor does he expect the tide of submissions to ebb any time soon. Recent and upcoming events ensure sustained public attention for the project. On April 22, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton announced the NEA grant at a press conference in Washington, D.C. Later that day, Pinsky and his two immediate predecessors in the laureate's office -- Rita Dove and Robert Hass -- joined President and Mrs. Clinton for a poetry reading and discussion. It was the third installment in the Millennium Evenings at the White House series.
"We are very grateful that Robert Pinsky has created a program for recording poems, the poems that help define us as individuals and as a nation," Mrs. Clinton said at the event. She and President Clinton are two of the many public figures who have agreed to contribute poems to the archive.
To help promote the project, Pinsky is also encouraging civic leaders around the country to arrange Favorite Poem Project readings at local libraries, Centers for the Book, and arts organization facilities. These readings are meant to involve community members in the spirit of the project by having them present their favorite poems to a live audience. Pinsky's office has furnished arts administrators in all 50 states with materials for hosting such events; the packets also include submission forms for participation in the Favorite Poem Project.
Maggie Dietz, director of the FPP, says its growth has necessitated a commensurate expansion of her office, staff, and resources, all of which are housed in 236 Bay State Road; an administrative grant from the University has made that expansion possible.
"It's nothing like what we originally envisioned," Dietz says. "It's a Library of Congress Bicentennial Project. It was one of the White House's Millennium Evenings. We've got the NEA's largest Millennium Project Award of 1998. We're working with the New England Foundation for the Arts [NEFA]. We occupy three offices; we've basically taken over the creative writing wing. We've got five networked computers that have this database we've built from the ground up, which now has 1,600 applications entered in it. This has all happened inside of a year. It's just mushroomed."
With NEFA's assistance, Pinsky and Dietz are now turning their attention to filling the executive producer's position. The person they hire, Pinsky says, will be responsible for figuring out the production logistics, creating the technical templates upon which the archive can be built, and overseeing either the audio or the video component of the project. He or she will also hire and direct the producer of the other component.
"It's a whole other set of considerations that I don't know anything about," says Pinsky. "Thankfully, the people at NEFA, my umbrella organization, are very accustomed to doing things like this. They're talking to lots of private foundations and corporations around the country. We're very optimistic that we'll come up with the right people."
Pinsky hopes the NEA award will, among other things, function as seed money for the project. With production afoot, other sources of financing might begin to emerge.
"Once production starts, we'll have actual footage and recordings that we can share with people," says project coordinator Linda Kim of NEFA. "I'm sure that will help open funders' eyes to the project. Right now, it's all sort of conceptual. But soon we'll have tangible material to present."
That will include, for example, a recording of Steve Conte-Aguero, a marine staff sergeant of Cuban-American descent who wants to read W.B. Yeats' poem "Politics" because, he writes in his application, "in my childhood and adolescence, being at my father's side imprinted in me the significance of things political, first as they motivated his work as a voice for exiled Cubans and later as I tried to find my place in his personal history and our own American history."
"It's really fascinating what he's written," Dietz says of Conte-Aguero, "as is the fact that there's this Cuban-American military man who wants to read this Irish poem."
Every application entered into the database is assigned a ranking, from 1 to 3, the former denoting those most likely to be selected. The main criterion for participation in the project, Dietz says, is that the reader have "a unique connection to the poem, whether it's for a very personal reason -- it reminds the reader of the birth of a son, for example -- or because of something more existential, or because the reader has a keen sense of the poem's sounds and loves to speak them. There are all sorts of reasons, but it's always something very striking and unique that earns a 1 ranking."
Such a standard is consistent with Pinsky's proposition that the essential medium of poetry, the instrument on which poems are meant to be played, is the human voice.
"The principles involved in the thing are so fundamental to me that it's almost hard for me to think of it as an idea . . . because it's the idea," Pinsky says. "My dearest hope is that this project will affect the teaching of poetry -- that it will foreground a personal and indeed physical relationship to a poem as an important part of the teaching of poetry."