POETICKS

The other day I happened to get an announcement of the winners of the latest Florida grants to artists.  It got me thinking, for the umpteenth time, about how little was being done for non-mediocrities in the arts–and why.  The main reason, of course, is that grants-bestowers consider only an applicants credentials, never his achievements.  More exactly, what happens is that the money people realize they don’t know anything about the arts, so they pay “experts” to choose whom to give money to, and their experts are mainly college professors almost as ignorant about the arts as the money people.  But do they ever have credentials!  (Note: I am not saying all college professors are deadheads, but most are because the conformity required to get an advanced degree is something few people with artistic-creativity genes have.)

I suspect there’s no way this increasingly bad situation can be remedied, but here’s what I’d do for grants to poets (and by simple extension to all artists) if I had the power:

(1) Form a committee to create a . . . list of all the schools of contemporary American poetry!  Big surprise, that, eh?  For 35 or more years I’ve been calling for this in vain.  I’ve made a partial list myself, but haven’t had time to do the research necessary to make it complete, or to gather examples of the poetry produced by those in each school, and define it.

(2) Post the list (whoever forms it, which I’m sure would have to be professors) on the Internet, and announce it everywhere possible on the Internet, once-a month for a year, calling for additions.  Accept all additions–except the obviously spammed ones.

(3) Make sure each school’s poetry is described reasonably well, and that examples of poems composed by its members and some names of poets in the school are given.

(4) Post the completed list and solicit genuine experts in the poetry of each school to choose grants recipients–with an offer of a nice sum of money.  Such an expert would be someone who has composed a substantial amount of the kind of poetry of the school he claims to be an expert in or written a substantial amount of criticism of the school’s poetry.  Credentials will not count.  Perhaps passing a test would be required, one with questions about the school involved and its poets.  Here’s where the big problem will be: selecting people capable of verifying that X is indeed and expert in the poetry of School A.  I could do it, and I think there are others who could, but people like me would never be allowed to make the selections by the money-providers for the same reason we could never get a grant from their grants-bestowers.  Probably what would have to be done would have to be done by the members of the schools themselves–finding among themselves proper judges–and getting someone with money for grants.

(5) anyway, the goal would be to make a list of poetry experts, with at least one for every school with ten or more members–and draw from that group at random for the judges in any government, or government-subsidized, grants-bestowing organization, with the hope that private groups will act similarly.

It’d be nice if a single prize for which only otherstream poets were eligible were set up, too.  An otherstream poet being one who, to put it simply, is not a member of any mainstream school.  (Elsewhere, I listed otherstream schools in detail.)

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