John Barr: The newspapers all called it a $100 million gift, but it was actually about $175 million. One short-term consequence of Ms. Lilly's amazing gift was all the positive publicity the poetry world, and poetry as an art form, received. It really thrust poetry back into the mainstream of American life and culture, and that is very much in line with our strategy. The second thing the gift provided was a sense of new possibilities. You could feel it run like an electric current through the poetry world and, to a lesser extent, the general public. All of a sudden things that had been limited by the financial resources available to us were limited only by our imagination.

PND: You left a successful career in the for-profit world to join the Poetry Foundation. Are there aspects of your background that made that transition easier?

JB: Three areas of my background have been a help to me in making that transition. The first was my involvement in start-ups. Even though Poetry magazine has been around for over nine decades, everything else about the Poetry Foundation is brand new. When I arrived in February 2004, we had a large bank account, a new name, and the magazine — but not much else. In my previous career, I was involved in helping to start three different companies from scratch, and I just naturally saw this organization as a start-up operation. The second thing was my experience with strategic planning. A lot of what I did on Wall Street was to work with clients to help them develop their own corporate strategies, and it was obvious when I got here that creating an organizational strategy should be the first order of business. And the third and last area that has been handy has been my mergers-and-acquisitions experience. The way that has played out here is best seen in our efforts to develop collaborations and joint ventures, which are similar to mergers and acquisitions. In fact, we currently have collaborations up and running with the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Library of America.

PND: From your perspective, what's the most significant difference between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors?

JB: The main difference is the adrenaline that comes from working on Wall Street and the pressure to generate mergers and acquisitions, give good advice to your clients, and hope that at the end of the process your firm earns a large fee. Of course, the daily need to find business and make money is not a concern in a foundation like ours. But in a not-for-profit where fundraising is a daily fact of life, you can have a good idea, you can develop it and get your board to approve it, but you've still got to find the money to implement it. For us, it's truly liberating to have those constraints removed.

PND: Are there affinities between the for-profit and nonprofit worlds?

JB: "Affinities" is a good way to think about how for-profit and not-for-profit organizations can learn from each other. For example, a nonprofit like the Poetry Foundation can learn from for-profit organizations how better to organize and manage its business. There's no reason a not-for-profit cannot run itself just as efficiently and according to the same business principles as a good for-profit operation. For us, that might mean applying cost-benefit analysis to our programs; it might mean looking at expected returns on the various initiatives in our strategic plan; it would be the kinds of things that corporate managers consider when making investment decisions. We're doing some of that, and we also created an organizational strategy for the foundation within a few months of my arrival, so in my view we're moving as fast as most start-ups in the for-profit world.

On the flip side, business people would be better decision-makers if they paid more attention to what poetry and the arts have to teach them. Sometimes in the interest of making a bottom-line decision, a business person will simply reduce an issue to the question, "Do we or don't we make this investment?" Poetry keeps itself open to ambiguity and the full complexity of a situation for a much longer period of time. I've noticed that business people who are seriously open to the arts are more subtle and more open to the questions of how one takes risk and reaches a decision.

PND: You worked on Wall Street for eighteen years and were once described in an article as a "poet-businessman." Did any of your colleagues know about or encourage you to pursue your artistic bent?

JB: Thirty or thirty-five years ago, the business world wasn't as open-minded as it is today. That's something that really changed during my career. As my clients came to know about my writing, they would think it was great. In fact, I've probably sold more of my own poetry books to clients and friends in the business world than I have in the poetry world.

The idea of the "poet-businessman" really catches the popular imagination. The two stereotypes — a poet cut in the mold of Shelley and a businessman cut in the mold of John D. Rockefeller — are so opposite that the contrast is striking. Nobody gives it a second thought when a doctor plays a stringed instrument, but people are intrigued by the idea of a poet-businessman because the business of the poet is to deal with interior reality and get things right in terms of perception and emotion, while the business of the businessperson is to get things right in the external environment. To me, the business of the poet and the business of the person in business are both to create order out of chaos, with this difference: In the case of the poet, it's the internal chaos of our emotions, while for the person in business, it's the external chaos of the business world.

PND: Did you have a particular mandate when you stepped into your job as president of the Poetry Foundation?

JB: The mandate was definitely there, but it was open-ended, and that's exactly what I had hoped for. The board basically wanted the new president to take charge of everything: come up with a strategy, review that strategy with them, and then implement it.

PND: Was your board involved in developing that strategy?

JB: At the outset, we talked with the board about our respective roles and decided the board should write the mission statement — they should point the way to the mountain — and management should figure out how to climb the mountain. The mission the board came up with is for the Poetry Foundation to pursue a more vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. Then the staff of Poetry magazine and the management of the foundation came up with half a dozen initiatives to support the mission, and the board unanimously approved them.

PND: You announced your strategic plan more than a year ago. Was it meant to be a short-term plan, or did you think it would take longer to implement?

JB: There was no time limit. Basically, four of us — the editor of Poetry magazine, Christian Wiman; the manager of our other programs, Stephen Young; our financial officer at the time; and I — sat around a conference table and developed the plan out of thin air in a little more than three months. I had a set of views, and my colleagues contributed their own views to the discussion. Together we worked to articulate a clear view of poetry as an art form, to lay out what we thought its needs were, and to describe our own initiatives in response to those needs. While there is no time limit in terms of putting our strategies in place, we are halfway through the second year of the plan, and within the next few months, we will have all our programs up and running.

PND: Are the programs exclusively Chicago-based at this point?

JB: Only one initiative, Poetry magazine, is specifically Chicago-based, and that's in recognition of the magazine's having been here for over ninety years. Our operation has always been Chicago-centric, and the board is mostly from Chicago, so we want to be a good cultural citizen of the community. But all of our new initiatives are national in scope, and over time, our board will evolve into a more national presence.

PND: As president of the foundation, what has been your greatest challenge to date?

JB: Getting our landlord to fix the plumbing. Seriously. We moved into some extremely temporary space in Chicago, and the daily business of trying to make the heating system work has been a challenge. In terms of serious challenges on the job, there really haven't been any, I'm grateful to say. The board has been wonderful, and the media have been supportive. Before I got here, there had been some negative publicity about the foundation and what it was going to do with all its newfound riches. But we've really been spared negative press since I came aboard. Positive articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Christian Science Monitor, to name a few, and we were featured on NPR.

PND: But you have been criticized in some quarters for your decision not to become a grantmaking foundation....

JB: There's a technical reason for that — and a more substantial reason, as well. The technical reason is that after studying a variety of foundation legal forms that we could have chosen under the IRS Code, we ultimately decided to opt for a private, not-for-profit operating foundation. This requires that we spend 3 1/3 percent of our assets each year on programs that we ourselves manage or co-manage with a partner. But the more substantive reason is that the choice reflected what management and the board wanted to do. If the foundation did not have a ninety-three-year history of publishing Poetry magazine behind it, we might have thought longer about becoming a grantmaking foundation.

PND: Why is that?

JB: Because having published the magazine and not missed a monthly issue all those years, the foundation's board already was very much in the business of publishing, as opposed to the grantmaking business. The second reason is that if you're in the grantmaking business, you can only do good for the art form called poetry as long as good ideas are presented to you. Whereas, if you're an operating foundation, you have an opportunity to create a strategy that ties together your ideas about the art form so that they relate to and interact with each other.

PND: The foundation doesn't support poets with grants, but it does support them through various awards and prizes. Do you plan to offer more of these in the future?

JB: We currently distribute over $150,000 a year in prizes and awards. The Ruth Lilly Prize, now in its twentieth year, comes with an award of $100,000; the Neglected Master Award is $50,000; and the Mark Twain Award is $25,000. This year, we plan to offer, in addition to those three, the Emily Dickinson First Book Award of $10,000 to a poet over the age of fifty, as well as a $10,000 award for criticism. And we'll most likely announce a couple of new awards next year.

Prize money is also part of the poetry recitation program we've launched, both for the winning students as well as the schools they attend. We'll probably award about $100,000 in prize money through the recitation program next year, when we pilot it on the national level. That's not putting money in the pockets of poets, but it is putting money in the pockets of the educational community that supports poetry. I believe that if you're funding the arts and poetry, you're feeding future poets.

PND: So you will be taking the poetry recitation initiative national?

JB: Yes. Our pilot programs in Chicago and Washington, D.C., went very well, and for the 2006 spring school term, we hope to have recitation contests in all fifty states.

PND: What else do you have in the works?

JB: We have an initiative to build a big Web site. The content will be closely aligned with what we do in Poetry magazine, and that, in turn, will be aligned with what we do through the prize and award programs. Our new Web editor used to work for Microsoft and is also a serious poet, so she brings to us the two things we want in our Web operation — a professional knowledge of how the Internet works combined with a deep passion for poetry.

PND: Will the new site be similar to, or compete with, poets.org, the Academy of American Poets site?

JB: The academy has a terrific Web site, with a wonderful database of contemporary American poets and their biographies. Serious poetry users, including myself, go to it frequently. Our site will not compete with theirs — we're going to publish an online anthology, for example — but it will probably overlap in some areas. I believe the Internet is a growing market, though, and the more poetry Web sites there are, the larger the overall market for poetry.

PND: You spoke about collaborations earlier. Has your experience with partnerships and collaborations to date been positive?

JB: As I learned in the business world, you need to pick your partners carefully and then have a shared understanding of who will do what, backed up with written agreements. We are extremely happy with the initial round of partners we selected: the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Library of America, which in October is publishing a book of poems by Samuel Menashe, the winner of our Neglected Masters Award in 2004. We look forward to continuing those collaborations, and we are also in discussions on a number of new joint ventures. Graywolf Press has just agreed to publish a book by the winner of the Emily Dickinson Award. Incidentally, we received more than eleven hundred submissions for it, which is a phenomenal response for a first-time prize.

PND: You've also collaborated with the poet Ted Koozer on the American Life in Poetry project. Would you consider working with other poets?

JB: We collaborate with Ted Koozer because he occupies the office of the Poet Laureate of the United States. We are in constant contact with poets like him around the country, and have invited them to read for us on Poetry Day and to meet with us when they come to Chicago. We also publish their work in Poetry magazine, and will publish their work on our Web site.

PND: Do we do an adequate job in this country of exposing kids to poetry?

JB: No, I don't think so, and none of my colleagues does, either. How do we fix that? First, I'd say we have to get more poetry into the classroom, but how we do that is terribly important. For many people with a life-long love of poetry, that love was sparked when they were schoolchildren, either hearing poetry read by a favorite English teacher in the classroom or at home. When you're in your teens, you've got an emotional openness that makes you receptive to poetry, and one of the ideas behind our recitation program is that if you memorize a great poem at that age, it's likely to be your friend for life. It can be the basis for a much broader involvement in poetry.

We proceeded carefully on the recitation program, knowing that the failure rate of programs to get more poetry into the classroom is quite high. We wanted something that could really be a winner. When we test-marketed the program in Chicago and Washington, D.C., about five thousand students participated. Now, as I've mentioned, we're planning to pilot it on a national level, and if it continues to be well received, we hope that someday it will be as popular as the national spelling bee. This year's winning high school student in Washington, D.C., who is from Nigeria originally, recited, from memory, The River Merchant's Wife by Ezra Pound and The Second Coming by Yeats and had the audience in the palm of her hand. That's a wonderful advertisement for good poetry.

PND: Do you think open mikes and poetry slams are a rejection of traditional poetry?

JB: I wouldn't call it "rejection." It's a natural process of displacement rather than outright rejection. The open mike and poetry slam are about individual expression and lifestyle choices. In the classroom, students receive what civilization has to offer them; what they do in front of the mike is to give back whatever they want — and usually it's their own work. The traditional and newer models are all healthy, and they're all important.

PND: Has the foundation considered funding a poet-in-residence program or some other type of initiative on college campuses?

JB: No. I can't think how that would fit into our strategy. Poetry is alive and well in academia. Our mission is to get it back into the mainstream of the country and to find areas of the poetry world that need our support. MFA programs, poetry workshops, and poets-in-residence programs are doing just fine without us.

JB: We look forward in the years to come to carrying out programs that we hope will move poetry into a more vigorous mainstream presence in this country. Our dream would be to see poetry enter a new Golden Age. Typically, art forms experience Golden Ages when they appeal to the general public of the time. Think of drama in Shakespeare's day. He was writing for average people willing to stand in the rain at the Globe Theater and be entertained. Think of the novel through much of the twentieth century. Think of movies today. Nobody goes to them because they're forced to; they go because they love movies.

PND: Is there anything else you'd care to share with our readers?

When it comes to poetry, the general consensus is that poets are writing more out of the mainstream than they were twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago. If poetry is going to experience another Golden Age, more of it will need to be written for and made accessible to a general audience, in the way the poems of Mary Oliver and Billy Collins are. A Golden Age can't occur until the art form starts to take its energy from the people, and we have a little to say about that. We can hope to bring the audience to poetry, but how poetry responds is up to poetry. However, I do believe the response will be magical.

PND: Magic seems like a good place to end our conversation. This has been a pleasure. Thank you for speaking with us.

JB: Thank you.

Alice Garrard, a writer for PND, spoke with John Barr in August. For more information on the Newsmakers series, contact Mitch Nauffts at mfn@fdncenter.org.