Complete this phrase: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue . . .’
Attention, poets! Are you looking for meaningful employment during these difficult economic times? Would you like a job that uses your poetical skills and involves both travel and reading your work in public?
Good news: The State of Illinois is seeking to fill the prestigious position of poet laureate. Qualified candidates must have lived in the state for 10 years and seen their work published by a non-vanity press. Awards are helpful. A letter of nomination is required.
But you must act fast. The deadline to apply is Aug. 15.
“This role is a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity to contribute to and shape the cultural history of our great state of Illinois,” said first lady M.K. Pritzker, who will select the new laureate from a list of nominees.
So why are you hearing about this only now? The idea was to make a splash in early spring. Certain cataclysmic events intervened.
“Maybe April, maybe tie it into Poetry Month,” said Mark Eleveld, a book publisher on the search committee. “It kept getting pushed back.”
The post has been empty since 2014 — the administration of flint-hearted Bruce Rauner certainly wasn’t going to do anything poetic — when the last poet laureate, Kevin Stein, stepped down.
“I tried backing out sooner,” said Stein, who is the Caterpillar Professor of English and coordinator of the creative writing program at Bradley University in Peoria. “There was the task of putting together a search committee. There’s no stipend, no travel budget.”
Which is not to suggest cash doesn’t change hands. It does. Alas, that money is spent by the poet laureate rather than accruing to the lucky honoree. Gwendolyn Brooks was Illinois poet laureate for over 30 years. How was that experience for the Pulitzer Prize winner?
“Mama made the poet laureateship what she needed it to be,” said her daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, who heads the search committee. “When Gov. Kerner first asked her to be the poet laureate, she wasn’t sure. That was in the late ’60s. The question for her was: ‘Is this something, as a black writer, I should be focusing on right now?’ ”
Brooks’ friends urged her to accept. She asked Kerner what her responsibilities would be.
“He said your responsibilities are commensurate with your pay,” Blakely said. “And, of course, the pay was nothing.”
So when Brooks gave out all those cash awards to Illinois elementary school students?
“Her money,” Blakely said. “She created the Poet Laureate Awards for K through 12th grade.
She paid for the awards, paid for the telegrams, the letters out to the schools. She traveled all over the state and read and did classes and worked at libraries. People would write in and say, ‘I won one of these awards.’ It was the biggest moment in many people’s lives.”
Given the late announcement and the non-pecuniary nature of the job, it is perhaps unsurprising the committee has not been inundated with applicants.
“We have gotten three so far,” Blakely said.
Why so few? In addition to no money, fame might not be on the table, either. The first Illinois poet laureate, named in 1936, was Howard B. Austin, who filled that role for 26 years and yet is not exactly a household name. A glance at his poetry hints why:
For Henry Horner, Governor, They gladly faced the fray, And when the smoke had cleared away
They saw a brighter day.
Austin was replaced by Carl Sandburg, already famous when named. Ditto for Brooks. Then Stein, who is candid about the low glamor/high effort status of the job.
“I’d drive three hours, give a talk, maybe do a dinner, drive three hours home. Every library I read in, I would give them money to buy books from Illinois poets. So I’d drive seven hours in a day, work five hours and give them 250 bucks.”
He estimates he did that hundreds of times in “readings and presentations, schools, libraries, churches, nursing homes, factories.”
“Is it a bad job?” he asked, repeating my question. No, it changed his view of poetry.
“It is a redemptive thing, a positive experience,” Stein said. “In graduate school, you are fed this notion of poetry as a dead art. Poets as priests in a village of agnostics, holding the wan candles against the dark night of ignorance.
“I found out, when I became poet laureate, that’s bunk. Every little burg I went to — Watseka, Kankakee, the suburbs of Chicago — I found large and enthusiastic crowds there to celebrate the sustaining virtues of poetry in their lives. They weren’t there to celebrate me. They were there to celebrate poetry.”
And how did the Illinois poet laureate view people celebrating poetry rather than himself ?
“I was sweetly flummoxed,” Stein said. “So many little poetry clubs, little ladies with sheafs of poetry under their arms clutching as if a Bible, everyone pulling a poem out of their back pocket. It resulted in a real transformation in my intellectual and poetic lives. A really tough job that altered and transformed me as a scholar and an artist in a positive way. My own work changed.”
“There’s no pot of gold at the end,” Eleveld said. “You’re doing this because you love poetry, up, down and sideways.”
“If you’re lucky enough to have a talent of any type, put it to good use for the world,” said Stein, asked for advice to give the next poet laureate. “Be oneself and at the same time be selfless.”
Like poetry, this subject transcended the limits of my form. On Wednesday, I’ll talk to a few potential poet laureate candidates and reveal a worrisome cloud looming on Chicago’s dynamic poetry scene. Meanwhile, anyone interested in applying to be poet laureate, or in nominating someone, go to https://www2.illinois.gov/sites/poetlaureate/Pages/default.aspx.