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Critical scholarly mass huddles in Denver
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Something like 100 of the nation's leading literary critics and scholars met in Denver over the weekend to talk about improper enjambment of lines when poems are published on the Internet; Euripides' nurse's soliloqies in Medea; and the defacto chore of setting standards for poetry foisted upon Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation in the aftermath of Ruth Lilly's $200 million endowment of both institutions.
One poet/scholar participant, Jill Leininger, a development specialist for the Vermont Studio Center, a well-known artist/poet-in-residence program, said the question usually asked first among such gatherings nowadays is "What would the Poetry Foundation do?"
Stephen Young, a former editor at Poetry who moved to the foundation when it was formed to manage the Lilly money in 2003, gave a rundown of what the endowment has allowed the foundation to do: a set of programs endorsed as great tools for teaching poetry in almost any setting, according to Toni Holland, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington (between Dallas and Fort Worth), who brilliantly came to Denver prepared for the city's first snow of the season.
Unless you're interested in such issues and topics, however, you probably missed the three-day, annual conference of the Boston-based Association of Literary Scholars and Critics at the Westin Tabor Center Hotel in downtown Denver. But even in the snow and cold, the confab was a good opportunity for Colorado's literary crowd, led by Boulder poet David J. Rothman, a ALSC board member, to show off our city's arts-friendly infrastructure to a pretty brainy group of mostly East Coast literary heavy-lifters.
Mike Henry, executive director of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, boasted that his organization's enrollment of as many as 800 member/writers was a little known "growth industry" waiting for him and his wife, Andrea Dupree, to tap when they moved from Boston to start the Lighthouse 14 years ago. Mayor John Hickenlooper last year recognized the Lighthouse community of writers as one of the city's prized intellectual resources.
Coverage of such a gathering here on Denver Examiner.com is somewhat unusual, according to the Poetry Foundation's Young, because most news reporters consider poetry "an amusing curiosity" rather than real news. Lilly's big-money endowment and Poetry magazine's mission to create the largest audience possible for poetry worldwide has worked as a wake-up call to the news business, however,
Henry's experience in Denver has demonstrated how writing can be a true industry that adds value to regional metropolitan centers across the nation. Cheers to David Rothman for bringing a national group of critics and scholars to a city whose reputation as thought-provoking and artistic is growing in step with its continuing credibility as a top-ranked sports center.
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