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Capitalizing Poetry
Barr Photo courtesy Poetry Foundation |
In 2002, pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly made a gift in excess of $100 million to the Modern Poetry Association (now the renamed Poetry Foundation). Tapped in February to figure out what to do with the foundations windfall was John Barr (MBA 72), managing director of SG Barr Devlin, a New York firm that provides strategic and financial advice to clients in the electricity and gas industries. Barr, the foundations president and a poet in his own right, has published six volumes of verse and has taught poetry in the graduate writing program at Sarah Lawrence.
Barr told the New York Times (October 7, 2004) that the foundation intends to launch the biggest and baddest Web site for poetry out there, sponsor regional contests (patterned after the National Spelling Bee), and undertake major initiatives to promote poetry in schools and libraries. He said that the foundations strategy is to give poetry a more vigorous presence. Instead of simply writing checks to poets, our idea is to grow the number of readers (San Francisco Chronicle, June 27, 2004).
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