ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, February 19, 1997 TAG: 9702190063
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT NOLIN SUN-SENTINEL
We're a nation of poets and we don't know it.
From drawing room to trailer court, street corner to shaded mall, the generation weaned on the screwball verse of Dr. Seuss is writing and reading more poetry than any generation before.
``I would say that in the last five years there has been a poetry renaissance,'' says Elise Paschen, executive director of the Poetry Society of America in New York.
Poetry, that once-scorned object of schoolyard snickering, now popular?
Just ask the 8,000 who attended the Cowboy Poetry Festival in Elko, Nev., last month. Or the crowds who jam neighborhood bookstores and cafes for poetry readings and competitions. Or the increasing number of homegrown scribblers eager to air their deathless rhymes over the Internet.
According to Lee Briccetti, director of Poets House in New York, 1,300 poetry books were published last year. There were 250 published during the entire decade of the '40s.
``It's just one of those interesting cultural phenomena,'' Briccetti says.
``Poetry is alive and well,'' says Frank Herrera of Borders Books & Music in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where groups meet biweekly to read their work. The store includes love poems among its Valentine's Day promotions.
Real poetry, however, is kept alive mostly by small, independent publishing houses, which the National Endowment for the Arts says have increased 500 percent over the past 30 years.
``We're doing better than we've ever done for the past 25 years,'' says Mike Wiegers, managing editor of Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Wash., the oldest exclusive publisher of poetry books in the country.
Wiegers' house releases about a dozen titles a year, and is hitting poetry paydirt to the tune of about $500,000 in annual sales.
``People are reading more poetry and those who are publishing poetry are getting a little more savvy about it,'' he says.
In New York, Chicago and Boston, a project called Poetry in Motion is mingling poems new and old among ads in subways and buses. An estimated 7 million riders view them every day.
``We have had the most positive response to the program,'' says Paschen. ``People in all cities are exuberant by the fact they read a poem on their subway or bus ride.''
The American Poetry and Literacy Project of Washington, D.C., has distributed more than 100,000 books of poetry in the past five years in airports, hotels, subways, homeless shelters and train depots.
``People scoop them up,'' says Andy Carroll, project director. ``The demand for poetry is way beyond what we can fulfill.''
Once a solitary occupation, poeticizing has now become the latest player on the performance art stage. Poetry slams, a couplet-to-couplet Texas death match recited before judges, are springing up across the country.
At the Borders in Boca Raton, Fla., senior rhymesters exercise their iambic pentameters once a month. ``It's very well liked,'' store employee Darlene Coombes says of the program.
Poetry editor Wiegers has gotten about 3,000 unsolicited verse manuscripts over his transom each recent year. ``Quite a surge in the number of folks seeking publication,'' he says.
``There's a huge amount of poetry getting written out there,'' agrees Bill Wadsworth, executive director of the Academy of American Poets in New York, the nation's largest poetry organization.
According to a 1988 Harris Poll, about 42 million Americans, or one in five, indulge in the gentle art of poesy, mostly free verse.
Publishers say the writers range from pipefitters to professionals, truck drivers to teachers. ``People who are trying to connect with words,'' says Briccetti of Poets House.
Human connection is the key to poetry's popularity, experts theorize. In a culture defined by technology's rigid framework, people seek comfort in poetry's ancient purity.
``It's a way of escaping this society in which we live, that is dominated by computers, television,'' Paschen says. ``It's a way to get human contact.''
Ironically, the technology that drives people to poetry is the same one that allows them to spread the word through desktop publishing and the Internet.
The 'Net, home to such sites as ``Bad Teen Angst Poetry,'' is perfect for short, screen-length poems rather than cumbersome prose.
Does all this lyrical quantity make for quality lyrics?
``We get lots of bad stuff,'' bemoans editor Wiegers.
``Terrible,'' says Harry Ford, senior poetry editor at Alfred Knopf publishing in New York. ``You can't believe how bad it is.''
Consider this gem plucked from the Internet, titled ``I Love You'':
``You're kissable and cuddly;
You're lovable and sweet;
You thrill me every minute,
And sweep me off my feet.
You're charming and disarming,
Desirable and true.
You inspire and impress me,
And that's why I love you!''
- Ara John Movsesian, who styles himself ``a modern-day Cyrano de Bergerac"
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