Robert Pinsky, poet laureate of the United States, wants to create a lasting tribute to the power and place of poetry in the lives of Americans at the turn of the millennium - and he's looking for a way to build a gateway to it on the Web.
Pinsky's ambitious effort, which will be launched with readings in five US cities as part of National Poetry Month in April, is called the Favorite Poem Project. Over the next two years, 1200 volunteers will be selected by Pinsky to record the poem they love most on audio and videotape for the archive, to be housed at the Library of Congress in Washington. The archive is slated for completion in the year 2000.
The first public reading will take place on 1 April at Town Hall in New York City, with Geraldine Ferraro, singer Suzanne Vega, 60 Minutes host Ed Bradley and students from local schools. ABCnews.com is considering a live cybercast. An event at the Library of Congress will follow the next day.
Though a small proportion of the readers will be well-known - Walt Whitman devotee President Clinton and the First Lady will deliver their favorite verses, and Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) will offer up T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" - most of those chosen to read for the archive will be just folks. The oldest volunteer to date, a 97-year-old Sunday school teacher named Louise Hartzog, will commit Robert Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra" to the ages in a South Carolinian accent, and Theodore Roethke's "The Sloth" will take its place in the Library of Congress as intoned by a third grader.
"I want to get every state of the Union, all ages and professions," says Pinsky, who believes that sound and video recordings of people reading best-loved works are a truer embodiment of poetry than text sitting on a page.
"The medium for the art of poetry is the voice," Pinsky explains. "When you take a poem in through your body, and you remember it ... there's an almost genetic evolutionary comfort and excitement that becomes associated with that information. It's the equivalent of being hugged or touched."
Pinsky believes the archive will prove to be of enduring interest for centuries, because poetry "is a reliable constant in human affairs. If you want to know about a country, a place, and a time, you look to poetry."
By including voices from every level of society - including homeless readers - and poems read in various languages, including Spanish, Yiddish and Navajo, Pinsky hopes that the Favorite Poem Archive will render a "portrait of a well-educated democracy." Each reader will also explain briefly why they chose a particular poem.
To give people all over the world a way to see and hear the contents of the archive, the creators of the project are hoping to find a commercial or non-profit sponsor to fund the building of an online site, and experienced Web designers who are committed to the project's vision. The New England Foundation for the Arts is acting as project administrator, and Boston University, where Pinsky teaches English and creative writing, has provided a grant of US$150,000 to cover the initial operating expenses for the entire venture.
"Technology is very crucial to this project, and the Net is the most efficient and effective way to create access," says project director Maggie Dietz. Selected readings will also be released commercially as CD-ROMs and DVDs.
Dietz points out that one of the goals of the project is to encourage the teaching of poetry in elementary schools.
"This curriculum is shrinking," she observes. "Poetry is viewed as something that is taught and written in universities. Teachers are afraid to teach it."
Dietz hopes that the archive and the public readings will provide a "comfortable point of entry" for those who feel intimidated by the "pomp associated with poetry."
"By seeing poetry read and talked about by someone who could be your next-door neighbor, you can connect through the person who loves the poem," she says.
Before an article in Tuesday's New York Times, the project received almost no publicity, but letters from people volunteering to read their favorite works - who heard about the project by word of mouth - had already started pouring into Pinsky's office at Boston University, Dietz says. Forms for volunteers will be circulated at the public readings, and will be available on the Favorite Poem Web site.
The letters themselves make moving reading. A jazz musician named Larry Tischler from New Mexico wrote that the night his first son was born, he listened to a recording of Dylan Thomas reading "Quite Early One Morning," and tears streamed down his face.
"I love the poem because it tells a story about a little town.... I lived in a little town in Colorado with people like that. Their lives and their stories, like the smoke from their chimneys, came out of them every day and joined the atmosphere where no one could see them," Tischler wrote. "Thomas' poem captures that so well."
Another volunteer, a retired parole officer from Baltimore, used to recite Langston Hughes' "Hold Fast to Dreams" to his clients. One day, he was astonished as a young parolee joined him in finishing the poem.
Pinsky, who is also the poetry editor of Slate, will publish a new book this fall called The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide.
The Favorite Poem Project, he says, will "recognize something that's true and neglected about our country, and contradict the cynical dismissals of poetry.... People have a natural affinity for poetry. We're social animals. Poetry is one of the classic things we look for in a culture."
