South Carolina: the poetry state: a professor teams with a newspaper to help bring lone voices and their work out into the open.

In the beginning was the poet. Then the poet called the paper. In partnership, the poet and the paper produced the column and the contest.

From the poet and the paper and the column and the contest came the Poetry Initiative, a South Carolina organization that runs a variety of poetry programming, including reading series, a poet-in-residence program, poem and book contests, the South Carolina Poets' Summit: and student- and teacher-training programs. "I just thought we oust to do something grand and really big," says Kwame Dawes, the Poetry Initiative's founder and director.

In 2003, Dawes a professor of English and distinguished poet in residence at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, realized that the state where he has lived since 1992 had no major poetry contests Few viable mechanisms existed for connecting poets with other poets, for providing them with venues for reading and publication, for fostering communities of people who appreciate poets and poetry. Without such services, Dawes knew poets might question the value of their work.

'One of the things that the Poetry Initiative is premised on is a very dogged belief that poetry is valuable to the community," he says. "In other words, a civilized society and a civilized community that appreciate poetry, love poetry and will enjoy poetry," Dawes says. "The problem is how to connect the poet with the larger community, how to connect the poets with themselves, with each other. What mechanisms are there for poets to get that type of opportunity?"

Poetry Out of the Closet

Dawes decided the most reasonable place to launch his Initiative would be through the State Newspaper, South Carolina's statewide daily. Dawes contacted the State Newspaper and suggested two things: He would write a regular poetry column, and the paper would help him run a poetry contest. "They said, 'Well, we don't know how that would work? And I said, 'Let's just try it for a few weeks and see what kind of response we get,'" claimed Dawes.

The response amounted to about 1,200 entries. "There are so many people who write poetry who are essentially closet poets. People who write and just hide it away," says Dawes. The Poetry Initiative/State Newspaper Single Poem Contest provided many of these people the permission to come out of hiding. In a four-week period, the mailroom received bags of letters containing entries to the contest, praise for the column and donations to the Poetry Initiative.

"There is something wonderfully invigorating and transformative about the act of trying to write down a poem," says Dawes. "I think everybody should be able to enjoy that pleasure. Everybody who enjoys that pleasure should be able to engage in it. They may have a sense that this is not something that is going to be published in Poetry, but it is something that has meaning and value, and over the years they will get better at it as they learn more about this craft and this art.

"To me, that is the person i want to encourage as much as I want to encourage the next Derek Walcott, or the next Robert Pinsky, the next Mark Doty, or the next Marilyn Nelson. I want to give them a vehicle to express themselves, to publish their work, to see what they need to do to improve their work."

Dawes also wants individuals and businesses to begin to invest in poetry as well as the arts. In the weeks leading up to the announcement of the grand-prize winner of the Single Poem Contest, the State Newspaper published a list of the top 20 entries and then published the top 10 of these poems in the paper.

Newspaper readers wrote in to select their favorite of these 10 poems, and the poet whose poem received the most votes received a special People's Choice prize of $200. "The State Newspaper became committed to the contest because they realized that at least half would buy the newspaper on the occasions that there was information about the contest and on the occasions when they were publishing some of the winning poems," says Dawes.

Something for All the Entrants

With the judging for the Single Poem Contest completed, the Poetry Initiative organized an awards ceremony very different from the traditional event. "The most important thing we did was to decide to make these people feel very special about their participation in the community," says Dawes. "Everybody who entered, not just those who won." The organizers invited all the entrants in the Single Poem Contest to a day of free workshops offered by the Poetry Initiative. Published poets conducted these workshops, and nearly 200 people participated.

"What we made sure to do was to remind each of the people who had entered of their contribution to the Initiative. They all paid $5 for each entry they made, and they had contributed financially to us. We also wanted to remind them of their contribution to this community of poets. I believe in nurturing those kinds of connections."

A prolific writer himself (Dawes's tenth collection of poetry, Wisteria [Red Hen Books], will appear in the fall of 2005, and his first children's book, I Saw Your Face [Dial Books] was published in December 2004), the founder of the Poetry Initiative believes in paying poets for the work they do. The winning poem in the Single Poem Contest received $500 and the five finalists $250.

"In everything we do we try to combine volunteerism with the idea that poetry is valuable work and that it can be paid." says Dawes. "We're changing the attitude of people about poetry so that they can come out and say, 'Yes, I like poetry. I'm interested in poetry.'"

Born in Ghana in 1962 and raised there and in Jamaica, Dawes has seen diverse possibilities for cultural development. He earned his Ph.D. in New Brunswick, Canada, and also serves as programming director for Jamaica's Calabash Festival for International Literature. Perhaps it is this international vision that has given Dawes the tools needed to begin this program.

"In West Africa, where I grew up, in Ghana and so on, the poet or the artist in general is not seen as somebody isolated from the community for the sake of being isolated" he says. "The artist is seen as a voice for the community, a voice in the community. This does not diminish the individual vocation and the individual voice of the artist, but it does mean that the artist is seen as a valuable part of the way the community lives," he says.

"Therefore, the opportunity for expression of hope, of laughter, of joy, of working out complicated things, of satire, of social commentary, and also for the keeping of the history, all of those elements are part of the role of the artist. Those elements and roles are critical to the development of a society and the survival of a community."

Community of Poets

Dawes's hope is that a variety of programs will help "all poets in the state see themselves as co-partners in the work of the Poetry Initiative." Rather than ending his relationship with contest entrants when the Single Poem Contest winners were announced, the Initiative used the names of the initial contestants as the core of their mailing list, a list that now reaches over 2,000 citizens of South Carolina. "We send them information about upcoming events, and they turn in numbers."

As a result, many other venues and arts organizations around the state are eager to partner with the year-and-a-half-old Poetry Initiative. "We have tons of activities," Dawes says. "We have a schools program called Split P Soup, which predated the Initiative but came under the umbrella of the initiative. We have a museums program called Frisson, which is a series of readings. We have a libraries program where we have readings. We've done collaborations with different universities. We've done collaborations with student groups, with poetry dubs. By the end of April, we will have put about 15 poets in residence in different venues."

Poets involved in the Initiative's Poet-in-Residence program are paid $1,000 to $1,500 for their work in museums, botanical gardens, opera houses, forts, and other cultural and historical sites. In return for this support, poets give readings, teach workshops and deliver performances.

For Dawes, all these programs increase the likelihood that people will he exposed to poetry. "If somebody else gets to like poetry, or buy a book of poetry, or start to go to readings of poetry, that is an end in itself," he adds. "It is a civilizing factor. I really believe that. To me it is most important."

Why now, and why in South Carolina? Is South Carolina simply lucky to be the place Dawes calls home? "I looked at South Carolina and saw there was a massive need," says Dawes. "I suggest people look at their environment. See what is happening and see what is not happening. Then talk about mechanisms to cover those areas where things are not happening. Instead of looking at South Carolina and saying, 'Oh man, what a mess!' I said, 'Wow, what an opportunity.' I mean this is a great place to make things happen. That kind of attitude transforms things and makes a huge difference."

Camille Dungy is a poet and assistant professor of English at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg Virginia.