South Carolina: the poetry state: a professor teams with a newspaper to help bring lone voices and their work out into the open

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2005 by Camille Dungy

In the beginning was the poet. Then the poet called the paper. In partnership, the poet and the paper produced the column and the contest.

From the poet and the paper and the column and the contest came the Poetry Initiative, a South Carolina organization that runs a variety of poetry programming, including reading series, a poet-in-residence program, poem and book contests, the South Carolina Poets' Summit: and student- and teacher-training programs. "I just thought we oust to do something grand and really big," says Kwame Dawes, the Poetry Initiative's founder and director.

In 2003, Dawes a professor of English and distinguished poet in residence at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, realized that the state where he has lived since 1992 had no major poetry contests Few viable mechanisms existed for connecting poets with other poets, for providing them with venues for reading and publication, for fostering communities of people who appreciate poets and poetry. Without such services, Dawes knew poets might question the value of their work.

'One of the things that the Poetry Initiative is premised on is a very dogged belief that poetry is valuable to the community," he says. "In other words, a civilized society and a civilized community that appreciate poetry, love poetry and will enjoy poetry," Dawes says. "The problem is how to connect the poet with the larger community, how to connect the poets with themselves, with each other. What mechanisms are there for poets to get that type of opportunity?"

Poetry Out of the Closet

Dawes decided the most reasonable place to launch his Initiative would be through the State Newspaper, South Carolina's statewide daily. Dawes contacted the State Newspaper and suggested two things: He would write a regular poetry column, and the paper would help him run a poetry contest. "They said, 'Well, we don't know how that would work? And I said, 'Let's just try it for a few weeks and see what kind of response we get,'" claimed Dawes.

The response amounted to about 1,200 entries. "There are so many people who write poetry who are essentially closet poets. People who write and just hide it away," says Dawes. The Poetry Initiative/State Newspaper Single Poem Contest provided many of these people the permission to come out of hiding. In a four-week period, the mailroom received bags of letters containing entries to the contest, praise for the column and donations to the Poetry Initiative.

"There is something wonderfully invigorating and transformative about the act of trying to write down a poem," says Dawes. "I think everybody should be able to enjoy that pleasure. Everybody who enjoys that pleasure should be able to engage in it. They may have a sense that this is not something that is going to be published in Poetry, but it is something that has meaning and value, and over the years they will get better at it as they learn more about this craft and this art.

"To me, that is the person i want to encourage as much as I want to encourage the next Derek Walcott, or the next Robert Pinsky, the next Mark Doty, or the next Marilyn Nelson. I want to give them a vehicle to express themselves, to publish their work, to see what they need to do to improve their work."

Dawes also wants individuals and businesses to begin to invest in poetry as well as the arts. In the weeks leading up to the announcement of the grand-prize winner of the Single Poem Contest, the State Newspaper published a list of the top 20 entries and then published the top 10 of these poems in the paper.

Newspaper readers wrote in to select their favorite of these 10 poems, and the poet whose poem received the most votes received a special People's Choice prize of $200. "The State Newspaper became committed to the contest because they realized that at least half would buy the newspaper on the occasions that there was information about the contest and on the occasions when they were publishing some of the winning poems," says Dawes.

Something for All the Entrants

With the judging for the Single Poem Contest completed, the Poetry Initiative organized an awards ceremony very different from the traditional event. "The most important thing we did was to decide to make these people feel very special about their participation in the community," says Dawes. "Everybody who entered, not just those who won." The organizers invited all the entrants in the Single Poem Contest to a day of free workshops offered by the Poetry Initiative. Published poets conducted these workshops, and nearly 200 people participated.

"What we made sure to do was to remind each of the people who had entered of their contribution to the Initiative. They all paid $5 for each entry they made, and they had contributed financially to us. We also wanted to remind them of their contribution to this community of poets. I believe in nurturing those kinds of connections."

A prolific writer himself (Dawes's tenth collection of poetry, Wisteria [Red Hen Books], will appear in the fall of 2005, and his first children's book, I Saw Your Face [Dial Books] was published in December 2004), the founder of the Poetry Initiative believes in paying poets for the work they do. The winning poem in the Single Poem Contest received $500 and the five finalists $250.