As I was planning to write these notes my original intention was to focus on how much I enjoyed my first experience of poetry in my community. The event, entitled The Hungry Young Poets, was organized by River Styx and took place at Duff’s Restaurant in the Central West End last summer. I attended mainly because I wanted to hear Ida McCall, the IWC’s program coordinator, read her poetry. The place was packed. I thought at the time, what better setting for poetry in my community could there be than the enthusiasm of the crowd, the wonderful readings, the music and the beer. But, as I watch current news reports on the efforts of artists and poets to protest the possible war with Iraq, I realize that current events demonstrate there are, if not so enjoyable, highly significant political roles for poetry in our community. Poetry has suddenly become powerful enough to be recognized in the political dialogue going on in our national community. Thus, where normally National Poetry Month would slip by rather quietly, this year’s observance promises to be, if you will pardon the expression, “the mother of all national poetry months.”

Perhaps this shift is not so sudden. The events of 9/11 changed the place of the arts in general and poetry in particular in American culture more than we appreciate. We should have suspected something new about the “place of poetry in American culture” when the Poet Laureate of New Jersey, found himself in the middle of a controversy after reading his poem “Somebody Blew Up America” where he suggested that Israel was to blame for the 9/11 attacks. New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevy asked his Poet Laureate, Amiri Baraka to resign his $10,000 a year state appointed position, and, when Baraka refused, state lawmakers began drafting a bill to oust him. Baraka promises to sue on First Amendment grounds. This controversy, like the poem itself, is not so interesting in and of itself. Rather, what is noteworthy is that since 9/11 even such seemingly remote environs as the world of poetry have become litmus tests for political visions of American culture. Before 9/11, few would have noticed Baraka’s statements or cared. After 9/11, things are very different.

Nowhere was this more evident than when the White House canceled a poetry event Laura Bush planned after a group of antiwar protestors announced their intention to use the event to publicly criticize the President’s intention of attacking Iraq. The event, called “Poetry and the American Voice,” was to focus on the poetry of Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. The White House spokesperson announcing the cancellation noted that Mrs. Bush believed it would have been “inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.” Although the event was cancelled, it was too late to stop the dissenting voices of the poets. In fact, Sam Hamel, one of the invited poets and the co-founder of Copper Canyon Press, organized a web site (PoetsAgainsttheWar.com) filled with antiwar poems submitted by both published and amateur poets from across the country. Not to be outdone, The Wall Street Journal (opinionjournal.com) declared “A Day of Poetry for the War” on February 12, asking readers to submit what they referred to as “pro-American, pro-freedom, anti-Saddam” poems. Both sites contain some very well written and moving poems surrounded by a large number of less well-written poems and finally some downright dreadful efforts.

Thus, we approach National Poetry Month with poets throwing verse at each other across ideological barricades, and a public that suddenly seems to care about what they say. Poetry is supposed to matter. Poetry forces people to expand the way they think about things. It may provoke, intrigue, and even outrage, but at the same time it draws people together in a common linguistic and cultural bond. Normally nowadays, poets are not asked to respond to events in the wider world. Normally, their works are used by others to celebrate a common identity, much as Mrs. Bush hoped to do with her “Poetry and the American Voice” event.

But just as the words of poets can reassure our common identity and bond, so too can they challenge us. This capacity to challenge the accepted view is one of the strengths of a democracy and it appears to be one of those times when poets, like other artists, are asked to respond to world events, to become the advance guard of a people’s intellectual forces. Poets should be accountable only to themselves, but in this public role that accountability should move them closer to a vision of the world that is more real, true, and engaged. Although the Poet Laureate of New Jersey might correctly assert that a poem is a subjective expression, it need not be inaccurate. Accuracy is vital if the poem is to serve as a tool of understanding and to help us question or come to terms with reality.

By the time you receive this calendar, this talk of war may no longer be relevant: war will either have been averted, or have begun. Whatever the outcome, poetry has made a contribution to the dialogue, and made itself part of a much larger community than the Academy of American poets could ever have imagined. Celebrate Poetry Month by attending one of the 18 programs of poetry reading found in this month’s St. Louis Literary Calendar.

Jian Leng, Assistant Director, IWC

Melanie Daniels wanted a school where she fit in, a school that recognized her strengths—artistic ability and creativity—and helped her learn through them. Instead, this daughter of a Chicago Tribune printer was a mother of two and a student at the (then) Memphis Academy of Art before her talents—her own worth and personal power—found validation in a career path.

The pain of trying to learn within a system that values itself more than its students, and values only those students who exhibit a narrow range of abilities, came back to her in force as Daniels saw arts programs in the St. Louis public schools closing down for lack of funds in the late 1980s. She knew there ought to be a school where artistic skills were not irrelevant, but were instead seen as keys that open up the learning process; a school where children could discover and develop gifts otherwise overlooked. She also knew that for such a school to exist she would have to create it. And so, in 1990, Taproots School of the Arts came to be in an atmospheric former school building in Dutchtown; an astonishingly brave undertaking for someone without a secure financial base.

Today a program called “Literacy Through the Arts” bases Taproots-trained educators inside public schools to integrate art across the curriculum—creative writing, papermaking, paper marbling, hand-bookbinding, letterpress printing, calligraphy, photography and pop-up page art—and enfold the many cultures (twenty-one different languages) of City neighborhoods. The art process not only connects and expands the curriculum; it helps students to connect to their own thoughts and feelings, and expands their skills. The program reaches out to the many children—often the poorest performers—who do not learn best via the decoding of number and letter symbols, but can master content they absorb with their hands and eyes working together. The twin aims of exposing students to a variety of media while encouraging personal expressiveness have also driven Taproots after-school and summer programs. Through good funding years and bad, Daniels has kept focused on providing opportunities to the young regardless of their ability to pay.

Another dream, one that has proven more elusive, is that of a school run by working artists, making and teaching art within a single dynamic institution. While Taproots is the only Book Arts Center open to the general public in the St. Louis region, with adult classes in papermaking and paper crafts, hand bookbinding and letterpress, bringing book artists together to create their own institution within its walls is the next goal on the Taproots agenda. The vision and the potential have always been ambitiously defined: St. Louis has no Book Arts Center (and the South Side has no art center) around which the many artists, craftspeople and enthusiastic novices, and old and New Americans who live there can coalesce. The upcoming Taproots Book Arts Fair, April 5 and 6, is, among other things, an attempt to broaden the participant base, calling all artists and inviting the public to join the school in undoing the past—the devaluation of urban life—by making something. When it happens collectively, it’s called the future.

Alice Layton Taylor is on the board of trustees of the Taproots School of the Arts.

The IWC is proud to announce that its website, http://artsci.wustl.edu/~iwc/, will have a beautiful new design starting this April. In addition to regularly updated information about all of our events, the website will feature on-line versions of The Figure in the Carpet and Belles Lettres: A Literary Review. It will continue to be the home of the on-line St. Louis Literary Calendar and to include information about numerous St. Louis literary organizations.

At the same time, we will launch our new on-line library catalogue. Viewers will be able to browse the catalogue to see what’s available and visit the library at our office in Old McMillan Hall at WU’s hilltop campus. Please call 935-5576 for more information.

In order to celebrate Black History Month and to give viewers an introduction to the lesser known films in the archive, the Film and Media Archive held screenings throughout the month of February. Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed (1976) was shown, in which a very young Bill Cosby narrates a film that examines black representations in Hollywood films and television. Another rare film was presented in partnership with the Academic Film Archive of North America and Cine 16 St. Louis, American Shoeshine (1976) directed by Sparky Greene. In this deep and entertaining exploration of the world of the shoeshine artist, a dozen or so shoe shiners, armed with hot-poppin’ rags and street-corner philosophy, introduce us to their world. No longer in distribution and rarely seen, few prints of this film, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1976, exist. In addition, two episodes of Eyes on the Prize—Ain’t Scared of Your Jails (1987) and I’ll Make Me a World (1998)—were shown. Professor Jeff Smith, Director of WU’s Film and Media Studies department, spoke before one of the screenings. He talked about the careers of the filmmakers that were profiled, including Spike Lee and Julie Dash, in the ten years or so since the series was produced and the difficulties that they have encountered. The last screening, “Out of the Archive,” aimed to show how for every hour of a finished program there are 10-15 hours of footage left out.

The last series begun by Blackside and ROJA Productions, This Far by Faith, a six-part historical documentary series on the African-American religious experience, is scheduled to air on June 24th - 26th from 9-11pm on PBS. The series will examine the impact African-American church has had on the social and political and artistic life of America.

Alison Carrick is the Special Media Collections Assistant at WU’s Film and Media Archive.