In America, no agency, citizen, government official, or academic functionary is entitled to wield authority over poetry. The British Royal Household includes a poet laureate, but all such power there is at the sufferance of the sovereign, not his loyal and obedient subjects, the British people.
Until Ralph Waldo Emerson, poems composed in the new world of the United States of America were meant to enter the ancient current of English poetry, which is as significant a tributary of the river sourced to Homer as any people ever has produced.
Rumi and Persian poetry, haiku and Japanese poetry…
… may be the best-known examples of alternatives to English poetry; they are powerful enough to “speak to” non-Persians and non-Japanese, as so little other national poetry speaks to outsiders.
Few people outside Greece today read poetry in Greek, but if the Romans hadn’t translated Homer into Latin, there’s little chance we’d be in this conversation today! Unlike many other national languages, English is full of words that began on the tongues of people in lands that no longer exist – as well as huge numbers of words from nearly every language in human history.
When apprehended without chauvinistic and other divisive filters, language is a cumulative phenomenon – it is dynamic, not static. Language grows when significant numbers of people add a neologism to their personal lexicons. New words appear on the street long before they make it into new editions of dictionaries.
Nature, Emerson’s ground-breaking, mind-blowing essay…
… appeared a full century before American politicians and bureaucrats got around to proclaiming poetry to be merely another element of the human experience within their jurisdiction. Whatever passes today for “official” authority over any aspect of poetry stems from whatever private, personal discussions that resulted, in the late years of the Great Depression (during FDR’s New Deal), in the establishment of the Office of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress*.
Thus, those apparatchiks, factotums, and feather-bedders employed old-fashioned anti-republican, faux-aristocratic shenanigans in order to extract this power from the invisible grasp of we the people, who had no more clue in the 1930s what was happening behind closed doors in Washington than do the winners and losers of DEI programming today!
Congress has no business in the governing, administering, or – heaven forbid, the facilitation of poetry, because poetry falls naturally under the jurisdiction of the universal imagination. NO abstract, artificial construct, such as municipality, university, guild, state, nation, or international alliance has a just or righteous claim on poetry. Anyone who claims otherwise need only present their rationale and make their case.
It is stunning that Congress and the U.S. Department of Education have taken it upon themselves to declare the existence of poetry/literary offices (The Center for the Book) in DC and all 50 states
Is anybody else stunned to know that there is an agency under the command of the POTUS, hard-wired to every public library in every city, town, and hamlet of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and Northern Marianas? Imagine what could happen if someone notorious for not paying their library fines ever got elected president!
(Disregard the coincidence that the higher-ed sector didn’t sense the tuition magnet that instruction in creative writing may be until the Famous Writer’s School, founded and run by TV celebrity and Random House CEO Bennett Cerf, was bankrupted and made to close after being found guilty of fraud, just as Tr#mp U. would be some years later. In 1970, when Cerf was busted, there were only a handful of colleges where one could major, or do graduate work, in “creative writing.” There are several hundred today.)
In the natural world, there is no authority over anything one doesn’t already wholly control. Poets, and their work, are denizens of the natural world. Persons named poet laureate, regardless the laurel-giver, be it elementary, middle school, high school, college, municipality, state, national, or congressional, are forever free as all caged birds are to preen and to sing for their supper. God bless our laureates emeritus.
* Archibald MacLeish, an overlooked hero …
… not only helped establish the consultancy but also occupied it for years. From this (artificially) exalted position, he led the effort in the 1950s to have Ezra Pound transferred to an asylum in NJ from an Italian prison, where he had been serving a life sentence for making hundreds of early radio broadcasts in support of Mussolini. Pound should be all the proof anybody needs to know why an impervious but invisible membrane must be allowed to remain between poetry and politics. Who do you think Trump would name as poet laureate, one of his taste-barren offspring?
In 1969, Archibald MacLeish and Bob Dylan collaborated on a musical, “Scratch,” based on the story of the turncoat Daniel Webster, but it never made it onto the stage.