Amna Nawaz:
Reading for pleasure has fallen by some 40 percent in the last 20 years, continuing a long-running downward trend. And, by many measures, reading skills for both students and adults continue to fall.
That’s just part of the impetus for a new effort to boost the world of words.
Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks to Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation. It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.
Jeffrey Brown:
A book festival in Miami, a haven for poetry in New York, a small publisher in Minneapolis, all part of the noncommercial literary world that nourished Elizabeth Alexander as a young poet.
Elizabeth Alexander, President, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation:
I went to places like the Loft in Minneapolis to do a reading and met so many people there. I went to bookstores that devote themselves to the work of small presses and met my audiences there. I went to an artist colony and had time to write more poems and also meet other writers and artists and musicians and see how they approached their craft.
That’s kind of how I know what works.
Jeffrey Brown:
And now you want to make sure those survive?
Elizabeth Alexander:
Yes, absolutely.
Jeffrey Brown:
She’s now in a position to do just that as president of the Mellon Foundation, one of the nation’s largest philanthropies and, for the record, a “News Hour” funder.
A new literary arts fund started with six other foundations will pump $50 million over five years toward nonprofit organizations that serve writers and writing, small presses, including of literature in translation, residencies, fellowships and more, a sector, says Alexander, of those who work with words struggling to survive.
Elizabeth Alexander:
The spaces that we’re particularly interested in are, how do these words make their way around? Someone’s got to put them on paper. Someone’s got to make them in book form. Someone’s got to give spaces for there to be readings and workshops. Someone’s got to make literary centers where people know that literature is valued.
Each day, we go about our business.
Jeffrey Brown:
But just how much is literature valued in today’s culture? Alexander herself has been at the center of national attention, reading her poem “Praise Song for the Day” at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama.
Elizabeth Alexander:
We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider.
Jeffrey Brown:
But headlines these days point to a crisis of national inattention and withdrawal from reading, a continuing decline in reading for pleasure, a steady drop in literacy rates.
And what we keep hearing is that the reading is going down, both of ability to read and also of reading for pleasure. Is crisis the word you would use? What do you see happening?
Elizabeth Alexander:
I would use that word and I would also add the other piece on, the leisure time, both actual leisure time and the perception that you could use your leisure time to disappear in a book, that that is something that is under pressure.
Jeffrey Brown:
Yes.
Elizabeth Alexander:
We have tremendous pressures with book banning. The kinds of experiences and lives and stories that are now being taken off library shelves and removed from school systems, that’s another kind of crisis that we find ourselves in that this literary fund isn’t designed to address precisely, but it does give you a sense of the times.
Jeffrey Brown:
The times also include federal funding cuts to the IMLS, an agency that funds libraries across the country, and to the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.
Elizabeth Alexander:
It’s all related, the $15 million grant that we made to the Federation of State Humanities Councils, so that every single humanities council in the country could stay afloat, and a lot of what they do — they do many different things, but they do things like oral histories of veterans in a particular community, or poetry workshops for people in a community.
A lot of powerful word activity happens at humanities center, so that is a way alongside this initiative that we’re trying to more directly address that crisis.
Jeffrey Brown:
In fact, Mellon itself has been the target of attacks from the right, as has the focus on DEI it and many other institutions of all kinds have embraced. Alexander is not backing down.
Elizabeth Alexander:
Our mission is unchanged, which is, we fund arts, humanities, higher education, humanities in public places, libraries, archives. That’s what we do, and we do it with a social justice lens. We’re always thinking about access, and we’re always thinking about equity, and we’re always thinking about which voices have not been brought to the fore or supported.
And I think that that context, as it connects to the literary arts, to me, the biggest crisis of our time is the atmosphere of dehumanization that we’re living in.
Jeffrey Brown:
Meaning?
Elizabeth Alexander:
Meaning that people are being othered from on high, meaning that the coarseness of language and action to value some lives more than others, to disparage is something that is ever more ambient.
Jeffrey Brown:
I presume you’re talking about even at the highest levels of government, where we hear words used that way.
Elizabeth Alexander:
And that are out of bounds.
Jeffrey Brown:
Out of bounds.
Elizabeth Alexander:
Yes.
And I honestly believe that certainly learning, but also the arts and, in the case of today’s topic, the word, are the best way, the most efficient and powerful way for people to see each other, and for people to understand that we all live different lives, and that, as a species, honestly, we don’t survive if we don’t figure out how to hear, respect and see each other.
And I think that literature has superpowers to do that.
Jeffrey Brown:
All right, Elizabeth Alexander, thank you very much.
Elizabeth Alexander:
What a pleasure. Thank you.
