January 14, 1999 | Read Time: 5 minutes
To promote his charitable work, Andrew Carroll has crossed the country and set up shop in places as diverse as a maximum-security prison, a 24-hour Las Vegas wedding chapel, a highway toll booth, and Elvis’s “Graceland” estate.
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In each spot, the 29-year-old has simply handed out free copies of poetry books to all takers — often weathering the stares of people who mistake him for a Hare Krishna devotee, he says. The giveaways are all a part of Mr. Carroll’s unusual cultural crusade to revive Americans’ interest in poetry. As leader and co-founder of the American Poetry & Literacy Project, in Washington, Mr. Carroll has helped distribute over 200,000 free books of poetry.
Great poetry, says Mr. Carroll, provides insights into life. But too few people ever discover it because poetry, he says, has largely been “hijacked” by academics and scholars. “Poetry was meant for the people,” he says. “Generation after generation have found wisdom and inspiration from it. That’s what I want this project to revive.”
Mr. Carroll began his quest eight years ago, after a friend recommended that he read a copy of a speech on poetry by the poet Joseph Brodsky. At the time, Mr. Carroll was an undergraduate English major at Columbia University — and hardly a fan of poetry. “I read only what I was forced to; nothing outside of classes,” he says.
Mr. Carroll was not familiar with the Russian-born poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate, but the speech “riveted” him. In it, Mr. Brodsky argued for taking poetry down from an academic pedestal and spreading it among ordinary people. “There was something about the speech,” he says. “There was a democratic zeal to it — a sense that literature is for everyone, it is not just for academics and poets — that just captured my attention.”
Mr. Carroll was so moved, he wrote to Mr. Brodsky and offered to help him with one of the speech’s goals: placing poetry in hotel rooms, the way Gideons International does with Bibles.
Mr. Brodsky wrote back, and after the two met in a jazz bar in New York, the Project was started in 1993. (Mr. Brodsky died three years later.)
In its first year, Mr. Carroll, who was the chief fund raiser, struggled to attract donors to the unusual cause. Finally, Book-of-the-Month Club agreed to donate 10,000 copies of Six Great Poets, an anthology, and Doubletree Hotels put them in its rooms.
Since then, the Project — which now publishes its own anthologies — has taken off. Last year, it gave away more than 100,000 copies of poetry books, doubling the total number it had ever given away. And it raised $100,000 last year, up from $20,000 in the previous year.
Mr. Carroll strives to keep the Project’s budget as lean as possible, spending nothing on salaries, office space, or other administrative expenses. He relies on volunteers and donated office space and earns his own living as a freelance editor.
Every year, Mr. Carroll says, he searches for new ways to encourage more people to read poems. Last year, he drove a Ryder truck, packed with poetry books, from his home in the District of Columbia to California’s Napa Valley to pass out books during the month of April, which has been designated National Poetry Month.
This year, the Project is working with Volkswagen of America to place a copy of an anthology of travel poems in the glove compartment of every new VW that rolls off North American lots in April. Also, new Peace Corps members will each receive a copy of the same anthology before they go abroad.
Among future plans, Mr. Carroll hopes to get more poetry into the hands of children and to insure that a poetry book is placed in every hotel room in Salt Lake City in time for the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Mr. Carroll says his unusual quest has attracted some critics: “Some people have said that we’re elitist. ‘Why don’t you give out bread instead?’ But I think we’re anti-elitist. We think poetry is for everyone. It gives us all a common issue and common topic to talk about.”
It’s difficult to assess the influence the Project has had on consumption of poetry. U.S. sales of poetry have increased, Mr. Carroll says, but that could be due largely to the building of big book stores and the ease of buying books via the Internet. Mr. Carroll says his best evidence of success is the drawers stuffed with letters in his office. Thousands of people, from judges to prisoners, have written unsolicited — and sometimes moving — letters to thank his organization for the poetry.
A jury clerk from a New York criminal court wrote to Mr. Carroll, who had passed out poetry in the jurors’ waiting room. “The jurors’ attitude underwent a sea change from aggrieved indifference to one of gratitude and amiability upon receipt of your books… . The court workers also enjoyed the experience. Men and women who daily deal with somewhat violent and coarse population in the holding cells of NYC Criminal Court were by your generosity momentarily escorted in a less brutal environment.”
American poets are grateful, too.
“There’s a wonderful quote by William Carlos Williams: ‘It is difficult to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there,’” says Edward Hirsch, a Texas poet who serves on the Project’s Board of Advisors. “Andy Carroll is someone who wants people to find what’s there. He’s willing to cross the country in order to do it.”
He notes that the fact that Mr. Carroll is not a sophisticated poetry expert works to his advantage: “He doesn’t threaten people in any way.”
Indeed, if Mr. Carroll had been more of a poetry insider, the Project might never have started.
He confesses that he would not have written to Mr. Brodsky if he had known what his stature was and that he had won a Nobel Prize. “I would have figured he’s not going to respond to me, some college kid,” he says.
