The Poetry Foundation has failed poetry. In the spirit of Ezra Pound and Harriet Monroe, we are starting over, with the door open.
Statement
In October 1912, Harriet Monroe answered critics who feared that Poetry would become a house of refuge for minor poets. Her answer was a policy, and she named it:
The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. Harriet Monroe, “The Open Door,” October 31, 1912
The Poetry Foundation is the steward of that magazine and the heir to that policy. We hold that it no longer adheres to it. The door Monroe swore to keep open has been shut, or half-shut. The magazine she founded to be free of entangling alliances with any single class or school has become an alliance with one. The verse it prints is chosen by where, by whom, and under what theory of art it is written, which is exactly the test she refused to apply. Prizes and money are awarded, as they were in Monroe's day, without anyone daring to call the winners masterpieces.
Monroe also warned that no contemporary can utter the final verdict, and that the minor poets of one age become the Coleridges and Keatses of the next. An institution that presumes to know in advance which poets matter has muzzled and braced itself into the very thing she wrote against.
Our verdict is this: the Foundation has kept the name and lost the mission. So we do not ask it to reform. We take the mission back. Poetry United begins again where Monroe and Pound began, with the door open, and with no alliance to any class or school.
A Poem
by Ezra Pound
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman— I have detested you long enough. I come to you as a grown child Who has had a pig-headed father; I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root— Let there be commerce between us.
First published in Poetry, April 1913, under Harriet Monroe's editorship. Public domain.
Principles
Monroe promised that the door would never be shut against the great poet still to come, and that the magazine would print the best verse being written, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art. Pound, for his part, gave three rules in 1913 that still hold:
Join
Poetry United is being built in the open. The site, the anthology, and the app live in a public repository, and the door is open to poets, readers, and builders alike.