Pennies for Poetry

When better to feature this important fundraising effort than during It's a Wonderful Life Week at TTH, no?

We owe everything to poets. Help them, Dear Reader.

Okay, I'll admit it. Once upon a time, for a long time, I didn't think the existence of poetry mattered. I'd been taught it all wrong. I'd been taught, for example, that poetry was worth more dead than alive.

My apathy verged on antipathy after a run of traditional English instruction by what Grace Paley calls "well-intentioned persons."

That fear and near-loathing lasted long after I myself began to write some really bad poetry of my own, long after I became a lifelong fan of David Byrne and the Talking Heads, long after I'd actually come to love individual poets and poems, and the people who taught them to me: Caroline Cage at Hillcrest High School, Jack Myers at Southern Methodist University, my own mom.

Even when I chose for myself--Marvin Bell, Anne Sexton, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dylan Thomas--I insisted that I didn't like poetry, or understand it, just those few poems. I was terrified of poetry as a genre.

Still am.

But so what? I can't live without it. If poetry didn't exist, in fact, I wouldn't still be here. It is that simple, and that personal.

So if the Academy of American Poets is wise, they'll cotton on to the tie-in with It's a Wonderful Life and do this Pennies for Poetry thing every year with, say, marathon showings of that heartwarming classic until somebody pays them to stop.

By the way, doubters and haters, the Academy has come a long, long way since 1999. Those of you who don't follow poetry news closely (does that pretty much cover most of you?) won't much remember what a closed shop the Academy had gradually become since its founding from Marie Bullock's apartment in 1934. It had become, how you say, erm, a little too focused on the DWM (no link yet in the Urban Dictionary, cause I just had to put it there).

Now? Now...www.poets.org is one of the finest sites for poets, for teachers, for readers, for newcomers, that ever was. It's filled with wonderful poetry that is happening right now, diverse voices and ages and ethnicities and genders (wait, there are only two of those).

So cough it up, friends and neighbors. Let's make our poets the richest people in town.