Not sure I am not overstepping bounds in sending this, but herewith.
Pre-refused by one of  my few outlets. Tom White

Will Poetry Survive Ruth Lilly Van Riper?

The poetry world (yes, Virginia, there is one) has been rocked by
astonishing news: an elderly poet, Ruth Lilly (age 87) has established an
endowment of $100 million to fund an annual $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry
Prize. (Before returning to her maiden name after a divorce she was Mrs.
Guernsey Van Riper Jr.)

Well, kids, there goes poetry as an honest craft‹what was left of it anyway,
after altogether tough times in the homeland since Browning was alive and
puzzling all England, and Walt Whitman was the good, gray, and largely
ignored sage of Camden, N.J., USA.

It¹s not that poets ought to starve. The fact that the serious ones, the
authentic ones‹the ones who can do nothing else‹do starve is irrefutable
condemnation of the society they live in. Nothing else. But like every other
social evil it cannot be fixed by government, and, I suggest, not by main
force either, force majeure, represented by the lush Ruth Lilly Poetry
Prize. (The money descends from the pharmaceutical outfit.) Poetry is a
lonely, private activity. Here¹s a jingle to that effect, entitled
³Orpheus²: 

I live in the wind, my lyre shrill in the wind
I have no place in the councils
But sing alone of high wide-ranging heroes
Those other lonely, who people islands as I the air

On the other hand, if the editors of Poetry Magazine should happen to like,
say, one of my effusions (they are to be arbiters of the prize) and award me
the moolah, I gotta tell you I¹d cash the check; just as I would take the
lottery prize (except that I do not buy tickets); and as I cash my monthly
SS check (while declaiming all the while against iniquitous
government-forced income redistribution). I am impelled by news of the Lilly
Prize to make this public confession and feel better for it; but I intend to
take money where I can find it, except that I will not steal and will not
sell drugs. (Not that I haven¹t thought a bit about doing both.)

But back to the prize. Many earth-people readers may not know that Poetry
Magazine became famous back in the years immediately before, during, and
after the war WWI, because that amazing shill for po biz, Ezra Pound, got
Harriet Munroe, to run Frost, Yeats, Eliot, himself, and others, all
trailblazers in the modern movement which transformed verse in English. H.M.
founded the magazine in the Windy City in 1912, and Pound was on to her from
London, where he was then living, like a chicken on a June bug. If H.M. had
not put up with his pushing and done what he told her to, Ruth Lilly might
never have heard of Poetry Magazine.

To put this whole matter on a time line: Pound was born in 1885; Ruth Lilly
was born (I calculate) in 1912. She would have been reading Poetry in its
latter years of ³the new thing,² through the 20s and 30s, and of course on
from there.  

It seems Poetry Magazine¹s present editor, Ed Parisi, often rejected Ruth¹s
poems, which came to her under the Van Riper moniker. He says it would have
made no difference if he had known who she was. I believe that, because it
would be more of a stretch for someone interested in poetry to believe in a
philanthropist who would drop $100 mil for poetry than to perform high deeds
in Hungary to pass all men¹s believing.

Eric Slater¹s AP story on Ruth¹s big gift does not suggest that she may be
revenging herself on Poetry Magazine for ignoring her. But it would be an
exquisite revenge. A king¹s ransom to close all doors to the Muses forever?
Maybe not. Let¹s leave room for hope.

Anybody interested in the story of Harriet Munroe and Ezra Pound and the
reason Poetry Magazine became‹in Slater¹s words in the AP article of Nov. 19
about the Ruth Lilly Prize‹³the oldest and, many believe, the pre-eminent
poetry journal in the English language,² might read the account of it in the
charming biography of Pound by Charles Norman (revised edition, 1969). (It¹s
not that Pound was totally and unfailingly charming, but that Norman is, as
a kind and quite truthful biographer). Pages 84 and following detail the
events. The very first issue of Poetry Magazine carried a note by H.M.:

³Mr. Ezra Pound, the young Philadelphia poet whose recent distinguished
success in London led to the wide recognition of his own country, authorizes
the statement that at present such of his poetic work as receives
publication in America will appear exclusively in Poetry.²

Looking back, that innocent announcement appears as a virtual manifesto of
revolution pending. (Pound¹s friend, revolutionary painter-and-writer friend
Wyndham Lewis said Pound was a revolutionary simpleton‹high praise of a sort
coming from that source.) Along the way Pound literally required Munroe to
print Frost, who had been rejected here but published in England. Pound
wrote the first review of Frost there and pumped him for years until he
became an American ³standard.² He did as much for many others.

The reactions of several poets consulted by Eric Slater were all most
favorable to Mrs. Van Riper¹s gift. So perhaps I am being sour grapes about
it. But I¹ll risk setting this down and wait for other comment to see how I
fare in the pundit sweeps. But I think of the awful fate of American writing
generally that resulted from the widespread making of cozy berths in the
universities for ³creative writers.² Cozy and creative somehow don¹t go
together. A sort of alarming perversity emerges from coddled people, or so I
think at least. 

However, I think I¹ll make up a batch of my scribbles and send them off to
join the flood. Odds are surely no worse than the lottery.

Hail, Ruth! Thanks for the thought.