Mr. FD received a copy of the Academy of American Poets poster for National Poetry Month. It’s pretty awful. The color is fine — lots of our favorite blue — but the overall design is extremely busy and generally not appealing. See for yourself, here.
The poster includes a quotation from one of FD’s favorite poets, Wallace Stevens (for information on WS one good site is the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens).
We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough
(Sorry about not printing that in a better format — FD has not totally mastered the wordpress coding system). Anyway, these lines are from the poem, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” and FD’s view is that they are just not wonderful enough for a poster that’s supposed to invite everyone to celebrate poetry. And Stevens, deathless as some of his poetry may be (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” for example) is an old, dead, white, male. Is that the face of poetry that the Academy wants to put forward?