Officialdom is dull and plodding like a turtle, which is why Washington failed to fling her lariat around poetry to brand it an Official thing, until a full century after one poet had announced the death of preaching from pulpits, seventy-five years since another had pronounced sex to be good, and about fifteen years since another had pronounced ice cream to be the only emperor.
Nothing scandalizes the bureaucracy and personnel of government more than people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Wallace Stevens, poets who act as if life is illuminated from within, rather than by public agency, political party, sect, cult of spirituality or personality.
And so it was during the Great Depression, during the reign of FDR, that this albatross of bureaucratic jargon was launched – the office of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, in 1937. Then, as if to remind us that bureaucracy grows continually, like weeds, some minion of Ronnie Reagan’s transitioned the office into a full-blown British thing – Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress!
Before such ugly nomenclature would become the law of the land, you can bet your bottom dollar that America’s far-flung cohort of poets had been kept in the dark! Some things are overwhelmed by the odor of officialdom. (When natural poets aren’t consulted, look what can happen: The Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division of the Science and Technology Directorate of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security. How did America manage without it, for more than two hundred years?)
We seem so keen to keep poets and writers on the right page, that we allow the Library of Congress to run Affiliate Centers for the Book in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and Northern Marianas.
If there were official Centers for Newspapers, Periodicals, Records, Movies, and TV shows, for Sculpture, Painting, Architecture, Opera, and Dance, for Atari, Activision, TikTok, Youtube, etc., then all those Book Centers wouldn’t feel so ominous, so Orwellian, so very 1984, which, of course, is the year the centers were established!
But, since there is no more demand among the public today for books of poetry than there was when giants such as Frost, Moore, Williams, Stevens, Bishop, and Lowell roamed the land, how can it be a good thing when an artificial agency, the ill-tempered issue of a Congressional appropriation, goes all-in on books?
In order to restore natural order to the people’s literature, we must repeal legislation that empowers public employees to promote or suppress it. Governments come and go, but literature is forever. Government knows that the pen is mightier than the sword, which is why it seeks to regulate both of them!
p.s. Please consider this coincidence: since the bankrupting for fraud of the Famous Writers School in 1970, the number of American college campuses where Creative Writing is an undergraduate major, or can be the basis for a master’s or doctoral degree, has exploded from six to several hundred.