Poets Leaving Academy to Protest Absence of Minorities
By DINITIA SMITH
NEW YORK -- Two prominent American poets, both of them women, have resigned as
chancellors from the Academy of American Poets, a venerable body at the symbolic center of
the American poetry establishment, to protest the absence of blacks and other minority
groups on the academy's board of chancellors. The chancellors, Carolyn Kizer and Maxine
Kumin, both of whom have lobbied to admit minorities to the board, submitted their
resignations to academy president Jonathan Galassi this week.
"There's never been a black woman chancellor," Ms. Kizer, who won a Pulitzer
Prize for poetry in 1985, said in a telephone interview. Ms. Kizer said she was also upset
by a larger problem, which she defined as "the insularity among the chancellors, and
the lack of women."
"I don't like the way the collection of chancellors sets itself apart from the
mainstream," Ms. Kumin, who won a Pulitzer in 1974, said in an interview. "I
don't want to see it identified with elitism. It's very much an East Coast group."
The academy, which was founded in 1934 by Marie Bullock and is based in Soho, at 584
Broadway, at Prince Street, promotes poetry nationally. Its 12-member board of chancellors
exists mainly to administer the Tanning Prize, at $100,000 the country's largest literary
award, and a smaller prize, the Academy Fellowship, of $20,000.
The board includes some of the country's best known and most influential poets,
including John Ashbery, Richard Howard, John Hollander, Jorie Graham, Donald Justice, J.D.
McClatchy, Mark Strand, Mona Van Duyn, David Wagoner and W.S. Merwin. This year the board
awarded the Tanning Prize to A.R. Ammons.
"They always go to the same person again and again," said Ms. Kizer, meaning,
she said, that the prize is frequently awarded to white male poets.
When the first Tanning Prize was awarded in 1994, Ms. Kizer said she lobbied for it to
go to Gwendolyn Brooks, an African-American poet. The chancellors awarded the prize
instead to W.S. Merwin, and were criticized because Merwin is a chancellor himself. In
1996, Adrienne Rich won the prize. The other winners have been James Tate and Anthony
Hecht.
Since 1946, when the academy began awarding its annual fellowship, the prize has been
given to only two African-American poets, Jay Wright and Robert Hayden. Of the 64
Fellowships that have been awarded, 14 have gone to women. There have been 57 chancellors
in all. There has never been a black chancellor, but there have been 12 women on the
board.
Ms. Kumin said that as vacancies have occurred she has lobbied for the poet Lucille
Clifton, who is black, to be elected. "We've just been out voted," she said.
Galassi, president of the academy and editor in chief of Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
said of the resignations of Ms. Kumin and Ms. Kizer: "I was very sorry that they are
doing this at a time when we are in the process of putting our governing structure through
review."
He said that he would not accept the resignations and that he would try to persuade
both poets to remain as chancellors to help him instate changes at the academy.
Galassi said the academy was in the process of assembling an ad hoc committee that
"will look at the constitution of the chancellors." "The academy has been
in the process of broadening for four or five years, and before that," he said.
"We started the National Poetry Month. We are starting a Poetry Book Club, an online
poetry classroom. They're all outreach programs. They are very inclusive."
"We want to be an organization for everyone," he added.
William Wadsworth, the academy's executive director, added that the lack of women and
minority groups on the board "has always been a controversial aspect of the
academy."
This year, German writer Fred Viebahn, who is married to Rita Dove, a black poet and
former Poet Laureate of the United States, attacked the academy in the International
Quarterly for what he said was "unapologetic racial 'purity' and gross gender
imbalance."
Viebahn pointed out that the academy had received $250,000 from the Lila Acheson
Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund in 1997, and criticized the National Endowment for the Arts
for awarding the academy $95,000 this year despite what he called a "tradition of
race 'purity' in its highest ranks."
Galassi called the charge "totally unfair."
"If you look at what the academy is doing, and who is working there, I just don't
think you can say it's exclusionary," he said. "But even the appearance of being
exclusionary is unfortunate and needs to be addressed. And that's what we're in the
process of doing."
The academy's board of directors controls the day-to-day running of the institution;
the chancellors are mainly responsible for the two prizes. The board has 26 members and
only one of them, Jamaica Kincaid, is black. Seven are women. Until 1987, there were no
blacks or Jews on the board. That year, when Lyn Chase, an heiress to the Folger coffee
fortune, became president of the board, she began recruiting Jews and blacks.
Wadsworth pointed out that the academy's full-time staff of 10 has several minority
group members and administers 160 college prizes and awards, worth about $92,000, a number
of which go to women and minorities. Among the prizes the academy staff gives are the Walt
Whitman Award, which is $5,000 along with book distribution worth $35,000. It administers
two other book publication awards, the James Laughlin Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize.
"The chancellors sound like they are the universally recognized spokespersons for
the world of poetry," said Ms. Dove, who has served as a judge for the academy's Walt
Whitman award and has taken part in many academy functions. "To have an academy where
minorities and women are underrepresented or not represented does send a subliminal
message to the world that there may not be minorities who are poets or many women who are
poets."
Ms. Dove said she had no interest in being a chancellor herself. "The message the
makeup of the board is sending is the message that we are the ones who hold the
power," said Ms. Dove, "and it's a closed club."