BROOKE GLADSTONE: The world is too much with...Poetry magazine these days. Last year, editors at the 90-year old journal Poetry learned that their humble publication would be getting an enormous gift from the drug company heiress Ruth Lilly. The collision of art and commerce has caused some sparks, as reporter Robert Frank wrote in this week's Wall Street Journal. Robert, welcome to OTM.

ROBERT FRANK: Thanks for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So the back story to this donation is like something out of a pulpy mystery: One day in the '70s, the journal receives a poem submitted by one Mrs. Guernsey Van Ryper, Jr. (sp?)of Indianapolis, and lo and behold, Ms. Guernsey turns out to be Ruth Lilly. Poetry editor Joseph Parisi wrote her his customary personal rejection letter and thereby hangs the tale.

ROBERT FRANK: Right. So, just about two years ago today, he gets a call from an attorney for Ruth Lilly who says she's restructuring her estate, and she's got a piece of it for Poetry magazine, and we haven't worked out the details yet. And Joe Parisi says "Well, roughly how much are we talking about?" And he says "About a hundred million dollars." [LAUGHTER] And Joe Parisi says "I think you've got a decibel wrong there."

BROOKE GLADSTONE:And we should say that this is a publication that until recently had a staff of four people working out of a borrowed room in the Chicago Library. A few years ago it had to hold an emergency fundraiser to pay its phone bill. It's like a person who lives in a trailer park suddenly hitting the lottery jackpot.

ROBERT FRANK: [LAUGHS] It is, although poets wouldn't want to be [LAUGHS] compared to people who live in trailer parks, but in the arts world it was the equivalent of sort of the Poor Matchstick Girl winning the lottery.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:And here's what I like about that metaphor --like the tragic stories of lottery winners that we've all heard, the magazine's new-found wealth doesn't seem to have been all it's cracked up to be. It didn't take long for the money to cause rifts within the organization.

ROBERT FRANK: Right. Well Robert Graves once wrote, and we put in our story, "There's no money in poetry, and there's no poetry in money." [LAUGHTER] The first problem they found out is that they had a lot of new friends. They had the investment managers from Wall Street come pouring in with phone calls saying "Oh, we're big fans of the magazine. You do great work." They had other literary groups wanting to do joint ventures. They had a group called America Scores, which promotes literacy through soccer, proposing a joint venture. And they just didn't know how to handle this sudden onslaught of interest. The second thing that happened, and probably the most important, was Joe Parisi resigning.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So how did this money somehow usher Parisi out the door?

ROBERT FRANK:Well, I've covered a lot of corporate resignations under mysterious circumstances, and I have never found one as mysterious and secretive as this one. No one would talk. Joe Parisi was bound by a non-disparagement clause to not talk about why he left, and Poetry's board would also not talk. But what I found out is that, as would be predicted, they disagreed over how to spend the money. Parisi is a anti-bureaucrat; didn't want a lot of programs, etc. He wanted it to go straight to poetry, straight to poets, with simple programs focused, you know, mainly on teachers.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what did the board want to do?

ROBERT FRANK:The board is not quite sure what they want to do. They have a lot of consultants and committees all working a lot of attorneys. They're also looking for a new president, and once they get a new president, they can sit down with that person and really map out a long-term strategy.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But it won't be Amiri Baraka.

ROBERT FRANK: [LAUGHS] No, I don't think so.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now how does Poetry magazine fit into the landscape of other poetry journals?

ROBERT FRANK:What poets tell me is that it's sort of the--old-white-guy of the poetry community -- very established; they have published and introduced to the world many of the most famous poets, dating back to the early 1900s. They were the first to print T.S. Eliot's Prufrock. They introduced Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath; even today they publish very established older poets. The younger poets resent Poetry magazine. They say it does not represent the avant garde, the true pioneering spirit of poetry. There's a fear that Poetry will be able to define poetry with a small "P" if they go around and start funding the programs and the poets that they like. Now, there's no proof that that's going to happen, and in fact there is proof that this has drawn positive attention to poetry with a small "P" and that it's helped at least establish it as a well-funded, serious art form.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Billy Collins, an old-white-guy, a wonderful poet and the former U.S. Poet Laureate--

ROBERT FRANK: Yeah--

BROOKE GLADSTONE:-- summed up the gift to Poetry magazine this way. He said "It's like leaving a fortune to your goldfish." Is there any possibility that this cash infusion could cause the publication to go belly-up, to stick to the metaphor, like an over-fed goldfish?

ROBERT FRANK: I think the risk is that the distractions of the money start to chip away at the publication, and the editors were very cognizant of that when I spoke to them. They're very concerned that the magazine itself stay separate from all this turmoil that's surrounding the money. But, when I was there, I went to visit Christian Weinman [sp?] who's the new editor, who was brought in to bring in edgier poetry and sort of update its image. I said "Oh, you must be reading a lot of poems." And he said "Well, I spent the morning doing that, but now I'm working on a marketing plan." [LAUGHTER] And he asked me about direct mail. [LAUGHTER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Robert Frank, thank you very much.

ROBERT FRANK: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Robert Frank is a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He wrote about the fallout from Poetry magazine's windfall in this week's paper. [MUSIC]