Midway through my frenzied packing, I came across an essay I had printed out some time back but never read: “Can Poetry Matter?” by contemporary poet Dana Gioia (Bush’s surprisingly good choice for a new head of the NEA). Taking a moment to read it now, I was struck by the truth of the essay’s main thrust: that poetry has lost its audience. Poetry has disappeared from the broader public imagination, Gioia argues, having retreated to the outskirts of ivory-towered academia. Poetry, in short, is now heard only by poets, rather than by a “cultural intelligentsia,” “limited [only] by intelligence and curiosity, [a] heterogeneous group that cuts across lines of race, class, age, and occupation.” And, I am afraid, I am a case in point; though I would probably self-identify as a snotty intellectual, I cannot remember the last time I purchased a volume of poetry.

Gioia further paints the decline of poetry as symptomatic of a more general concern. Echoing Whitman’s lament, “To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too,” Gioia points out that a disappearance of great audiences is slowly killing not only poetry, but other art forms as well, from jazz and serious theater, to classical music and dance. All are increasingly followed only by “subcultures of specialists,” rather than by even a small percentage of the broader population. While I’m too far outside of the would of poetry to comment intelligently on that front, from my position as both a classical and jazz musician (and avid fan of both), it is clear that the disappearance of a broad audience has indeed taken a serious toll on both of those arts over the past decades.

Yet Gioia’s essay is still a largely optimistic one. When, towards the end, he tells us that “if I could have my wish… I would wish that poetry could again become a part of American public culture,” he adds that he doesn’t think such a wish is impossible. “All it would require,” he explains, “is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public.” Gioia lays out a handful of proposals for how poets might do this, from using radio as a medium (“a little imaginative programming at the hundreds of college and public-supported radio stations could bring poetry to millions of listeners”) to writing critical prose about poetry that is both free of jargon and more brutally honest in its assessment of quality (“Poets must regain the readers’ trust by candidly admitting what they don’t like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism”).

Such an approach is heartening, and, I suspect, remarkably effective, due to the sheer number of poets, jazz musicians or dancers who would willingly rally behind the idea. If each were to dedicate only a small percentage of their time, say 5%, to effective outreach programs, the fine arts could easily have a remarkable public interest renaissance. Yet while most artists would be happy to donate their time to such an endeavor, few have the initiative to create such outreach programs from scratch. The arts are therefore in desperate need of an organization that can help develop innovative approaches to outreach and rally artists to those programs. In short, what’s needed is not the standard arts non-profit, which focuses on cultivating the arts, but a rather unusual one, focused on cultivating audiences.

I have a bad, bad feeling there may be another 501c3 in my future.