John Barr: A Man on a Mission For Poetry

Posted on March 30, 2005

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article about John Barr, the new president of the Poetry Foundation. A former investment banker, the charismatic Barr was named the president of the two-year-old foundation in February, 2004, which is funded with a $100 million gift from heiress Ruth Lilly, which made Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation the wealthiest literary organization in the nation. Barr has laid out a bold agenda to move poetry back into daily American life.

"We want to be uncommonly good at discovering the best poetry. We don't want to celebrate the status quo," he declares. At the same time, "we want to get work out there in front of people, placing it before the largest audience possible."

Barr has established several new poetry prizes, including a $25,000 Mark Twain Poetry Award for humorous work and a $50,000 Neglected Masters Award. The first recipients were Billy Collins and Samuel Menashe, respectively. Menashe's selected poems will be published by the Library of America. Barr, a former director at Morgan Stanley says he hopes his ideas will enlarge the poetry-reading audience so that print runs for poetry books will one day be 50,000 copies rather than 1,500 copies. His agenda is innovative and ambitious, to say the least. It's exciting to have someone with a Wall Street background using aggressive marketing techniques to advance the cause of good poetry.