Are poets always so touchy?

You may recall a few years ago when a huge individual gift suddenly turned a small sleepy Chicago non-profit into the Gates Foundation of poetry. The current issue of The New Yorker has a feature story on The Poetry Foundation (written by the magazine's own current star published poet), which has struck some folks in that particular literary world as more or less a frontal attack. Among them is the organization's president (see the second item of that column that was printed in Chicago's leading alternative newspaper yesterday).

Kudos to the organization's staff for posting the article and various source links on their own website; that has inspired some reader comments mostly echoing the negative comments which were quoted in the magazine article.

[Here is a counterattack on The New Yorker with regard to poetry; it's not particularly a defense of the Poetry Foundation, which despite its name is not a grantmaking foundation but an operating non-profit.]

Having read all of the above I'm left scratching my head a bit. The New Yorker article did not strike me as wildly negative or unbalanced, the executive director seems to be taking it more personally than it deserves. It's not warm or friendly but hardly reads like the kind of hack job he's labeling it. Meanwhile the actual criticisms of the organization's strategies seem plausible but also largely unpersuasive. Were I a board member over there I'd be suggesting that the chief calm down, accept that reasonable people can disagree, and keep moving forward with what sounds like a smart plan that is well-grounded in the organizational mission.

(But of course I'm no poet, as both of dot-org's loyal readers were about to point out, so perhaps there's more here than is apparent to the untutored eye.)

Is the cello half-full or half-empty?

ArtsJournal does an interesting thing making excellent use of this technology: they invite people working in a specific sector to participate in a focused online discussion, a short-term blog. This seems to have all the useful advantages of online discourse (like the ability to easily point readers to sources) without the disadvantages which can render open online chats pointless.

So for instance they got several knowledgeable people to discuss the state of classical music in the U.S. It makes the most sense to read if you click the "older entries first" button. I wasn't aware for instance that the New York Times recently declared this to be a golden age for classical music in America...At least some experts in the field seem to agree: "Virtually all of recorded history is at our finger tips. There are more opportunities to hear live performances than ever before. More opportunities to play music in any of the thousands and thousands of community groups that have sprung up in recent decades. The level of performance generally across the land seems higher than ever..." The chairman of a big-city chamber orchestra asserts that "no one has put forth a credible argument that there has been a real decline in the percentage of the population that appreciates the classical music art form."

However they also report serious troubles at a lot of major symphony orchestras, which are struggling to fill seats as people are less interested in subscribing and have more choices. That reminds me of the sad story of the San Jose Symphony which was well described in this report; it's quite unusual (and scary) for a non-profit institution of that size and history to actually go belly-up. One ArtsJournal commenter places those difficulties in the context of that all "producers of "popular" culture are scrambling to reinvent the ways they do business." He provides some excellent examples which, without using the term, amount to the "long tail" trend in action (which I'm now finding just keeps popping up in all sorts of disparate contexts).