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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Editors' Note appended.
Michael Lewis, a journalist and the author of "Liar's Poker" and "Moneyball," appeared in the magazine Poetry for the first time in the summer of 2005, with a satirical piece called "How to Make a Killing from Poetry: A Six Point Plan of Attack." It offered its advice in bullet-point businessese: "1) Think Positive. Nobody likes a whiner. And poets always seem to be harping on the negative. . . . 2) Take Your New Positive Attitude and Direct It Towards the Paying Customer. The customer is your friend. Your typical poem really doesn't seem to pay much attention to the living retail customer. . . . 3) Think About Your Core Message. Your average reader might like a bit of fancy writing, but at the end of the day he will always ask himself: what's my takeaway?" So it was slightly odd, and unintentionally comical, when, last September, Poetry published a manifesto, "American Poetry in the New Century," recapitulating Lewis's lampoon as a serious position. The author was John Barr, a former Wall Street executive and the president of the Poetry Foundation, an entity created after the Indianapolis heiress Ruth Lilly gave some two hundred million dollars to Poetry, in 2002. The foundation, which "exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience," also publishes the magazine.
In the essay, Barr declared, "American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now. There is fatigue, something stagnant about the poetry being written today." Poetry, largely absent from public life--from classrooms, bookstores, newspapers, mainstream media--"has a morale problem," he said; it is in "a bad mood." Poems are written only with other poets in mind, and therefore do not sell. (Two thousand copies is the industry standard.) He argued that the effect of M.F.A. programs, increasingly prevalent since the nineteen-seventies, has been "to increase the abundance of poetry, but to limit its variety. The result is a poetry that is neither robust, resonant, nor--and I stress this quality--entertaining." In a section titled "Live Broadly, Write Boldly," he urged poets to do as Hemingway did, and seek experience outside the academy--take a safari, go marlin fishing, run with the bulls. "The human mind is a marketplace, especially when it comes to selecting one's entertainment," he wrote. "If you look at drama in Shakespeare's day, or the novel in the last century, or the movie today, it suggests that an art enters its golden age when it is addressed to and energized by the general audiences of its time."
Barr grew up outside Chicago and says that, as an outgoing Midwesterner, he "survived" Harvard, which he attended on a Navy scholarship. He is sixty-four, small and bluff, with a warm, chuckling affect. In 1985, he started an energy-marketing company now called Dynegy, and, after retiring from a managing directorship at Morgan Stanley, co-founded an investment-banking boutique, Barr Devlin; he is also the author of six books of poems, several of them published in limited editions by a letterpress printer. He commutes between Chicago, where he and his wife, Penny, live in a hotel condominium on Michigan Avenue with a Shih Tzu and a miniature Yorkie, and three other homes, including a twenty-five-acre estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, which serves as a weekend place. (The Barrs have three grown children.) He is a big-game hunter--slightly deaf in his right ear--and a sailor, with a tan in all seasons. For years, he avoided talking about his poetry with business colleagues. "I was afraid that they thought of poets as hippies, and might have viewed it slightly askance," he says. Barr's latest book, "Grace: An Epic Poem," is told in an invented Caribbean dialect inspired by family sailing trips around the Windwards and the British Virgin Islands. It is anything but shy. (The narrator, a gardener, describes seeing the mistress of the house caught by her husband in flagrante delicto--"De gentleman, he produce his produce / like a corporate salami, and she hers, / like a surgery scar still angry red wid healing. / Den he settle his equipment in de lady's outback / an' he spud de well"--a predicament that leads to murder and nearly a hundred and fifty pages of poem.)
Barr's call for something new was, in a narrow sense, consistent with the magazine's radical origins. Harriet Monroe, who founded Poetry in Chicago in 1912, reflected in a memoir that at the turn of the century "the well of American poetry seemed to be thinning out and drying up, and the worst of it was that nobody seemed to care. It was this indifference that I started out to combat, this dry conservatism that I wished to refresh with living waters from a new spring." But, whereas Barr aspires to reunite poetry with the current of popular entertainment, Monroe, herself a frustrated poet, was motivated by distaste for the mainstream. The circular she sent to poets offered "First, a chance to be heard in their own place, without the limitations imposed by the popular magazine. In other words, while the ordinary magazines must minister to a large public little interested in poetry, this magazine will appeal to, and it may be hoped, will develop, a public primarily interested in poetry as an art, as the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty." The earliest issues contained poems by Ezra Pound (living in London and from the start the magazine's foreign correspondent), as well as H. D. and Wallace Stevens, both unknowns. In 1915, Monroe published a poem by T. S. Eliot, then in his mid-twenties: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." These poets, she wrote, "swept away Victorian excesses and weaknesses--all the overemphasis on trite sentiment with its repetitions and cliches, and on archaic formalities of diction and technique." East Coast newspapers made fun of the idea of "Poetry in Porkopolis," but nevertheless Poetry...
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