"State Verse Culture" & the Poet as Public Servant

Some thoughts while reading Amy Paeth's "The American Poet Laureate: A History of US Poetry and the State"

From the cover of Ed Sanders’ legendary mimeograph magazine of the 1960s. Despite the many faults of the boomers, I feel like this spirit could be of use to poets today.

Recently, I started reading Amy Paeth’s The American Poet Laureate (Columbia UP 2023), the first history of the US’s laureate system. Building on Juliana Spahr’s Du Bois’s Telegram and others, Paeth deepens the picture of poetry’s unique ties to the US state, specifically within the under-examined history and function of the Poet Laureate program. As she argues, we seem to have a perplexing blindspot regarding this office and its extension across the country. Because it’s not just a matter of a single national laureate, but also of the numerous state- and city-level laureates in an expanding network of fellowships, initiatives, and private-public cooperation that has tied poetry ever more explicitly into being a governmental resource. She refers to this as “state verse culture,” and its reach goes far beyond the laureateship itself.

And since Paeth’s book appeared, the laureate program has been ramping up. In January 2024, the Academy of American Poets received its largest ever grant: $5.7 million from the Mellon Foundation¹, much of which will be spent in the formation of Poet Laureate Fellowships. As the website states, “These transformational grants will fund community projects by poets laureate across the nation . . . for the next three years.” Thirty non-profit literary orgs will be involved in this (more on that below), and yes, we now have laureates across the nation. It takes a certain amount of governmental work just to establish a laureate position, but numerous cities and states have been persuaded to take this on and to continually administer it. All of this is relatively new.

As Paeth argues, not only is the laureate position a historically recent formation, but it has allowed for poetry to become a site where the line between public and private funding has been blurred, with the state’s role often going unnoticed. She writes, “Since the 1960s, the state has adopted an increasingly important role as the central pivot between the institutional infrastructure of literary professionalism, on the one hand, and of higher education, on the other.” She asserts that poetry’s central dependence on the state has been ”hidden in plain sight,” with many people instead focusing on the role of private foundations in the funding of poetry—the Poetry Foundation itself being the most conspicuous. However, Paeth argues that, in fact, the public and private spheres coordinate in highly intentional and complex ways:

[T]he collaboration between federal bodies and private cultural organizations has been typically initiated or facilitated through private patrons. . . . This cooperation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of what I call state verse culture—recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, and dominant following the formal end of the Cold War in the 1990s through the 2010s. By that time, the state, through its nexus of private partnerships, became the dominant organizing force in American poetry, even for poets with wide-ranging ideas about national poetic voice and citizenship.

The key players in this “nexus” include the NEA, non-profit literary orgs (such as Poetry Foundation), “individual and corporate patrons,” higher ed, and the Library of Congress. And many of these entities find formal coordination through an organization few seem to even know of, the Poetry Coalition:

The Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress are also now members of the Poetry Coalition, a national alliance of twenty-five-plus government, private, and nonprofit poetry organizations created in 2016 and administrated by the Academy of American Poets. The coalition marks the culmination of a series of important transformations in the field of American poetry, literalizing the consolidation of state verse culture. . . . The consolidation of public and private interests—and, with this, the blurring of previously diverse aesthetic and political values—defines state verse culture today. On the one hand, the consolidation of institutional interests provides historically unmatched support for poetry projects across the country. It also means that quasi-private organizations like the Poetry Foundation are now firmly allied to the state project, advancing apparently wide-ranging cultural missions that are often united, and bound, by a vocabulary of neoliberal multiculturalism and ambivalent nationalism.

The Poetry Coalition, which I would wager that few of us have even heard of, amplifies the larger cultural project of the laureate system and unites many of the main orgs in the world of poetry. The aforementioned $5.7 million given by Mellon to the Academy of American poets will help fund the coalition, operating in concert with many of the laureate programs. Their website states that the coalition now contains “nearly 30 nonprofit literary organizations,” and these include not only the usual suspects—PoFo, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, etc.—but also the Poetry Project and Beyond Baroque, two legacy institutions originating in a more countercultural, anti-establishment space. It draws all these orgs into a a robust funding network wherein the line between state and private is blurred, and it is so thoroughly distributed across the board that no one can make a critique without implicating nearly the entirety of US poetry.

I think what most bothers me here is not so much a propagandizing purpose from above—the state imposing its agenda through poets—but the way that this further weakens poetry’s capacity to marshal cultural resistance. Since the 1960s, it has steadily and increasingly been made to depend on the very things it ought to resist. There is danger in this dependency, and I feel that danger is very poorly understood. It leads poets into bad faith and rationalization while diluting its material position relative to capital and the state. These financial entanglements and cognitive dissonance will continue to weaken the poet’s self-understanding and conviction, and it will enable further complicity. For the state agenda seeks to cast poets as public servants: a kind of soft representative, an artsy diplomat or ambassador for the very idea of citizenship in the US. At its most overt, this is a nationalist, civic project in which the poet mediates the relationship between individual citizen and the state, making them legible and even amenable to one another. And as there are those who embrace this and do literally enact these things in this very spirit, we need to recognize that this agenda does have a foothold. And so a line needs to be drawn to help clarify the critique and more effectively establish an alternative, autonomous culture for poetry.

While it seems the culture of poetry has largely abandoned any pretense to being “anti-establishment” and “counterculture,” I am beginning to think these terms are in need of a revival. And in our present moment, I would argue that funding is the prime indicator of one’s position relative to any establishment. I think that, if a print-based counterculture for poetry is desirable, then those who want to be a part of it should begin to sort things out around this factor and to develop strategies for surviving outside of the financial nexus of “state verse culture.” In many cases, this will simply mean dropping out and doing things cheaply and on a smaller scale. That is, it will mean abandoning the idea that one’s efforts as a poet must contribute to a national cultural project.

1. A further point of interest here: the president of the Mellon foundation is in fact a poet, Elizabeth Alexander, who once served as the chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2015. She may be the most influential poet in the US, strictly on financial terms.