the Poetic Clearing-house Association

I love this hare-brained scheme for a poetry bank, delivered generously by C. Dale Young’s Avoiding the Muse, as expounded by The Idiot (a character of John Kendrick Bangs’ invention) in Harper’s at the turn of the last century:

What I’d like to see established is a sort of Poetic Clearing-house Association. Supposing I opened up an office in Wall Street – a Bank for Poets in which all writers of verse could deposit their rhymes as they write them, and draw against them, just as they do in ordinary banks with their money.

The Poetic Clearning-house Association works a bit like a futures market cum agent, seeking to “dispose of [the deposited poem] to a magazine” to fund the poet’s withdrawals. It has a gate-keeper, “an intelligent receiving-teller to detect counterfeits” and reject poetry that isn’t up to snuff, thus keeping the deposits high in quality. (We all know how well those high-quality banking instruments have worked out in recent history…)

I’ve actually given half-serious thought to a similar idea, while floating on my back in the deep end of the pool during the boys’ swimming lessons, a sort of Slush Pile 2.0; like any such exchange, of course, it depends on the participation of buyers and sellers who agree on the value of the products in the exchange. A sonnet bubble or irrational exuberance around creative non-fiction could doom the entire affair (cf. the collapse of the memoir market after the fraudulence of the last decade), but more likely there would be vaults stuffed to overflowing with quatrains and villanelles, their value depreciating by the day.

A few years ago I published a story in the late lamented Lily Lit Review about a poet who wanted to be a banker (a sort of mirror image of T.S. Eliot, the banker who wanted to be a poet). You can read the story here, or in my collection (just two bucks in e-book format!). (Don’t search for “Lily Lit Review” on the web; the domain is in squatters’ hands.) I don’t think my poor poet would have made a very good banker; he was far more interested in wearing a suit and having an office with a credenza than in the actual banking part of the job. (Much like our contemporary bankers are much more interested in the power and prestige than in the trust and thrift that banking implies.) I suspect, though, that he would have loved to take The Idiot’s Clearing-house idea and made it into a spectacular failure.

And if one must fail, one ought to do it spectacularly.