Even Poetry Is Undergoing Cutbacks
By PETER APPLEBOME
It’s not clear what’s more unlikely — that for 43 years most of the nation’s best-known poets have come to the modest Katonah Library for a poetry series begun by a former Mad Men-era adman, or that in this high-dollar address the series is now struggling to scrape together $6,000 to keep going.
Still, there’s a small tale of the arts in the real world in the long life and shaky future of the Katonah Poetry Series, which began in 1967 and now has no director or money for anything beyond what could be its last reading on Oct. 3.
“I said at one point that if you sat on the steps of the Katonah Library for 25 years without moving, you would have seen pretty much every major American poet walk through the doors,” said Billy Collins, the former United States poet laureate who was director of the series from 1991 to 2008. “It’s surprising and dismaying to me that this series could be breathing its last breath surrounded by such affluence.”