Departments
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Week of 2 April 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 29 |
Feature
Article
Warren appointed a chancellor of Academy of American Poets
By Eric McHenry
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Rosanna Warren |
Describing the Academy of American Poets, a large, non-profit organization that recently named her one of its chancellors, poet and UNI Associate Professor Rosanna Warren searches for the best metaphor. She first chooses "a sort of crystal structure," but quickly exchanges it for a coral reef.
"If the academy is a living thing, which is why I choose coral rather than crystals," she says with a chuckle, "then it represents a larger national poetic life that is already going on, and a conception of poetry that is always evolving."
"If it stops paying attention to that evolution," she adds, "it will simply become an artifact."
Recent organizational changes suggest that the academy, though in its 65th year, has no intention of retiring. The board's expansion was prompted in part by the resignations of Carolyn Kizer and Maxine Kumin, who very publicly stepped down as chancellors last fall to protest what they saw as the academy's exclusivity and narrowness of focus. With the appointment of Warren and eight other distinguished poets, the board, like American poetry itself, is now more populous and various than ever before. Lucille Clifton, Robert Creeley, Louise Glück, Yusef Komunyakaa, Heather McHugh, Michael Palmer, Adrienne Rich, Charles Wright, and Warren have agreed to serve as chancellors, which will contribute significantly to the diversity of approaches to poetry represented on the board. Jay Wright respectfully declined. The existing board includes John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Donald Justice, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and David Wagoner.
A new term of service for chancellors has also been adopted to help vary the board's makeup. Academy Executive Director Bill Wadsworth says it is an even more significant structural change than the doubling of the board's membership.
"The fact that the board has been criticized for being sort of static, a single generation of older poets, has mostly to do with a system that was in place until a few years ago whereby chancellors were elected for life," says Wadsworth. "And there were just 12 of them. As a group, inevitably, they were going to age, and there was little opportunity to change the board's composition over time."
The larger, more diverse board will also be more fluid, Wadsworth says, with staggered six-year terms of service, allowing the appointment of three new chancellors every year. When the old protocol for chancellor selection was adopted more than 50 years ago, he says, its framers could not have foreseen the heterogeneity that the academy would ultimately strive to represent.
Although the recent controversy has perhaps accelerated its transformation, Warren says, the academy has a longstanding investment in making poetry as democratic as possible. Created in 1934 to support poets and to promote a broad-based appreciation of contemporary poetry, it is now the largest such organization in the country. Among its most significant recent achievements is the designation