The American Poet Laureate by Amy Paeth

Author:Amy Paeth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

State Verse Culture After the Cold War: National Poetry Projects in Context

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National poetry projects are significant expressions of a broader shift in the civic function of poetry in post–Cold War America. As Brodsky’s “poetry for the masses” rhetoric indexes, the early 1990s heralded a second wave of the Frost-Kennedy era national arts vision. The 1990s saw the reintroduction of government poetry prizes, inaugural poetry, and new forms of institutional cooperation between the state and literary organizations.

In 1990, the Library of Congress awarded the inaugural Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry to James Merrill. Merrill, who had previously won the Bollingen Prize, was honored for The Inner Room (1988).14 It was the first prize the library had awarded since the spectacular fiasco of Pound’s Bollingen Prize in 1949, after which Congress ruled that a democratic government should not award prizes in “matters of taste.” As we have seen, during the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s the government played arbiter in matters of literary taste often more covertly—through CIA fronts and by building its relationship with private interests. Congress reversed the Bollingen Prize–inspired ruling in 1988, when the Bobbitt family endowed a $10,000 biennial prize to be given every other year in memory of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s sister, Rebekah Bobbitt. The Bobbitt Prize was in fact conceived of as “the new Bollingen Prize,” according to Robert Casper, who heads the Poetry and Literature Center, which runs the office of the poet laureate at the Library of Congress.15 Casper recalls that it was the intention of Philip Bobbitt, the son of Rebekah Bobbitt, to establish a prize that mirrored the Bollingen in structure. “The Bobbitt family wishes to endow a national poetry prize … in memory of Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt with the Bollingen Award as the model which the Bobbitt Prize might resemble,” Librarian of Congress James Billington noted in a memorandum recounting an initiating conversation with Bobbitt.16 Interestingly, Bobbitt would echo the language of the Library of Congress as it directed the fellows “to be deflected by political considerations” when administering the infamous first Bollingen Prize.17 In a letter to Nancy Galbraith, then-acting director for the Poetry and Literature Program, Bobbitt wrote that “there ought to be a prize given by the nation and politics should play no part in it.”18 But the “new Bollingen,” unlike its predecessor, would reflect the interests of a more robust, and mutually imbricated, set of state and state-private interests. “Congress through the distinguished chairman of the Oversight Committee, the White House, the American Academy of Poets, and several distinguished former poetry consultants have all concluded that the Library ought to re-enter the field and that the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt prize I have discussed is the appropriate way to do this,” Bobbitt wrote.19 Unlike the singular committee of the fellows that awarded Pound the first Bollingen Prize, the Bobbitt Prize mission reflects a nationalized conviction—“the point is for the Library of Congress, home of the U.S. Poet Laureate, to also have

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