by Dan Brady
“Evolution favours what is good at replicating itself, rather than what is good.”
Culture and Prosperity by John Kay
Natural selection tells us that organisms will choose their mates based on traits favorable to the success of the species. In theory, each consecutive generation is better adapted to the environment than the generation before. The economic downturn has created a new environment for arts organizations. In recent months, arts coverage around the country has focused on the uphill climb faced by arts organizations as they see their endowments plunge with the stock market, donors refocusing on personal finances, corporate funding dry up and audiences staying home. Arts organizations will be forced to perform their own kind of natural selection—analyzing programming and services to determine what can be replicated on a regular basis, establishing the carrying capacity of an audience and squaring ambition with budget.
Some biologists believe that evolution is a steady process. What we see in hindsight as a major leap—a fin transformed into a foot—is actually the product of hundreds of smaller adaptations over the course of millions of years: the micrometric elongation of a single bone, then another, and another. Still, others argue that, in rare occurrences when all environmental and genetic factors are just so, the equilibrium can be punctuated, mutation rates explode, and adaptations increase exponentially. The result is a transformation of the biological landscape—new species abound and struggle to survive.
For decades, a standard model for book promotion has been in place. Fiction writers often hit the road on lengthy tours scheduled through their publishing house and agent, but most poets and their small press publishers can’t afford such luxury. A poet’s book tour tends toward a handful of readings made possible by the generous offer of a friend’s couch, a rental car and maybe a spot on his or her MFA program’s alumni reading series. If the poet is lucky, ten to twenty people show up, about a third of who might buy a book.
Something different happened in the Fall of 2006. A busload of poets made their way across the country stopping at small towns, national parks, space needles, big cities, bookstores, bars, colleges, and military installations to read a few poems. Well, more than a few. In actuality, there were more than 225 poets, appearing in fifty cities in fifty days. This evolution of literary marketing was the Wave Poetry Bus Tour.
A few advances made the Wave Poetry Bus Tour’s success much more likely than it might have been in the past, the foremost of which is the Internet. Never before has the nationwide poetry community been more connected or democratic. Before the Internet, poets were more likely to carry out long conversations long hand over long distances with long silences between long, hard-thought answers. While the loss of this mode of letter writing may be lamentable for some, conversations now take place on a larger scale, with more participants, more eyes to examine, and more ears to hear. Word of blog is proving faster and more effective at building a buzz than word of mouth.
The organizers of the Poetry Bus Tour knew how to harness this most contagious form of viral marketing. For the duration of the tour, they posted daily on two blogs one, written by tour manager and poet Travis Nichols at www.poetrybus.com, featuring video, audio, and commentary from the road and another, hosted by the Poetry Foundation, with rotating reports from the bus by participating poets.
Blogs, however, are just another new species to come out of the truly culture-wide changes caused by the innovation, accessibility and personal empowerment of the Internet. With the increasing importance of individual interest and niche markets, there has also been a return to grassroots marketing tactics, a strategy that, out of necessity, has always been a strong point of poetry audience builders. Partnerships, local involvement, and free events were hallmarks of the Wave Poetry Bus Tour. The organizers contacted poets and literary magazines to scout for the best bars and cafes to host each event. Many readings featured a cadre of local poets who would share the stage for equal time at the mic—significant effort paid towards eliminating potential barriers between the audience and the poetry.
Growing out of this democratization is, perhaps, the most astonishing reversal of previous practices: the rejection of the competitive book promotion model by a for-profit publisher. Unknown by many, Wave Books is not a non-profit like most poetry presses. Wave is a regular book publishing corporation like Random House and Penguin. The Poetry Bus Tour was entirely free to the public and featured poets from dozens of other poetry presses. Proceeds from sales of non-Wave Books volumes did not go into Wave’s purse. In short, this was an enormously expensive undertaking for a corporation that received no monetary reward. One could argue that the promotion of poetry in general, the goodwill earned, and media attention paid to Wave Books by sponsoring the program could generate an eventual increase in sales-an optimistic outlook. In reality what this represents is the potential move towards a more collegial, rising-tide-lifts-all-boats spirit of enterprise not typically associated with for-profit publishing that could have enormous effects on the book industry. Imagine putting reading before book sales, community and literacy before the bottom line. Wave showed the way.
Of course, to return to biology, evolution is a process of selective mutation. Organisms and organizations alike will choose to reproduce traits of programming they recognize as healthy and appealing. If you examine fossil record, it becomes clear that some species have, at times, over-evolved, necessitating corrective adaptations. Like a dinosaur that outgrew its heart, the organizers of the Wave Poetry Bus Tour have decided not to embark on another tour of such scale anytime soon. The financial collapse has made this all but certain.
The gangbusters reading tour embarked upon by Jennifer L. Knox and Shana Compton in 2005 is a good example of what a scaled-down model for the Poetry Bus Tour might look like. To support their first books, the duo hit twenty-three dates across a three month span. In this model, a smaller contingent of poets—maybe one that could fill a van, not a bus—appears at fewer venues, but keeps up the Poetry Bus’ heart-stopping momentum and new media savvy. This model is based on the standard publishing industry’s book tour, but embraces grassroots marketing, the combustible energy of group dynamics and a frantic pace.
Another condensed model is the First Fiction Tour (NPR story) organized by Cindy Dach of Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Arizona. Running from 2003 to 2005, the First Fiction Tour featured five fiction writers who had 
recently released their first books reading at independent bookstores across the country in the span of a week. The tour’s marketing campaign included materials styled after vintage lithograph rock posters. The First Fiction Tour preserves the pace of the Poetry Bus Tour, albeit at an abbreviated length, while also maintaining the interplay of personalities sharing the stage, involvement of the local community and representation of multiple publishers. However, since the time frame precludes road travel, airfare costs alone may make this unfeasible without major financial backing.
In addition to reductions in scale, other changes could be employed to give the project longevity. A regularization of venues returned to year over year, much like the Academy of American Poets’ poetry circuits in the 1960s, could enliven local poetry scenes, create evolving partnerships, build institutional memory of the program and ease the stress of having to plot out a new tour at each undertaking. In order to reduce the number of poets featured without diluting the quality and diversity of the poetry, an application system through which the organizers select from a pool of candidate poets could be of use. In this model, selection for the tour functions as a kind of award, lending a certain prestige and inborn hype to the project.
Whatever convergences or divergences mark the next evolutionary step in poetry readings-whether resulting in readings—like the 20,000-plus attended Dodge Poetry Festival (now in limbo because of major endowment losses) or readings like Wave poet Dorothea Lasky’s 2008 Tiny Tour, during which Lasky read to a handful of friends in each room of her apartment and then posted the readings to YouTube—the Poetry Bus Tour has opened the door to change the way we think about the scope and ambition of author readings.
Regardless of whether or not it can be duplicated, the Poetry Bus tour will remain one of those strange, beautiful beasts once removed from the everyday animals—but there can be no doubt that it was good. We are in a moment of punctuated equilibrium. Arts organizations, for profit and not-for-profit, will need to adapt to new realities. The Bus Tour is only the first glimmer of what is possible when private enterprise and non-profit altruism work together for the survival of an arts industry.
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DAN BRADY is the poetry editor of Barrelhouse and the former editor of American Poet, the journal of the Academy of American Poets. He is also the editor and founder of Growler, a website devoted to reviewing debut collections of poetry. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Beltway Quarterly, Specs, and Circumference. He holds an MA in Arts Management from George Mason University and works in Washington, DC as an arts administrator.
