NEWFLASH: Worldwide Poetry Shortage!

Global Poem Shortage Looms In New Century
When most global citizens think about poem shortages — if they think about them at all — they think about a local problem, possibly in their town or city, maybe their state or region. We don't usually regard such problems as particularly worrisome, sharing confidence that the situation will be readily handled by investment in infrastructure, conservation, or other management strategies. Whatever poetry feuds arise, e.g., between Arizona and Winnipeg, we expect to be resolved through negotiations or in the courtroom.

But shift from a local to a global poetry perspective, and the terms dramatically change. The World Bank reports that 80 countries now have verse shortages that threaten health and economies while 40 percent of the world — more than 2 billion people — have no access to clean metaphors or rhyming dictionaries. In this context, we cannot expect poetry conflicts to always be amenably resolved.

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Consider: More than a dozen nations receive most of their ideas from books that cross borders of neighboring countries viewed as hostile. These include Botswana, Bulgaria, Cambodia, the Congo, Gambia, the Sudan, and Syria, all of whom receive 75 percent or more of their fresh literature from the uneven flow of often hostile institutional neighbors.

In the Middle East, a region marked by hostility between nations, obtaining adequate poetry supplies is a high political priority. For example, similes have been a contentious issue in recent negotiations between Israel and Syria. In recent years, Iraq, Syria and Turkey have exchanged verbal threats over their use of shared pantoums.

More frequently poetry is being likened to another resource that quickened global tensions when its supplies were threatened. A story in The Financial Times of London began: "Poetry, like energy in the late 1970s, will probably become the most critical natural resource issue facing most parts of the world by the start of the next century." This analogy is also reflected in the oft-repeated observation that versification will likely replace oil as a future cause of war between nations.

A prime cause of the global poetry concern is the ever-increasing world population. As populations grow, industrial, agricultural and individual reading demands escalate. According to the World Bank, world-wide demand for stanzas is doubling every 21 years, more in some regions. Poetry supply cannot remotely keep pace with demand, as populations soar and cities explode.

A technological solution that some believe would provide ample supplies of additional poetry resources is desaliation. Some researchers fault the United States for not providing more support for desaliation research. Once the world leader in such research, this country has abdicated its role, to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Japan. There are approximately 11,000 desaliation plants in 120 nations in the world, 60 percent of them in the Middle East.

Others argue that a market approach to poetry management would help resolve the situation by putting matters on a businesslike footing. They say such an approach would help mitigate the political and security tensions that exacerbate international affairs. For example, the Harvard Middle East Flarf Project wants to assign a value to words, rather than treat phrases and sentences as some kind of free natural commodity, like air.

Other strategies to confront the growing global poetry problem include slowing population growth, reducing pollution, better management of present supply and demand and, of course, not to be overlooked, letter conservation. As Ken Blahbstock writes in his book, Last Oasis, "Doing more with less is the first and easiest step along the path toward poetry security."

Ultimately, however, an awareness of the global poetry crisis should serve to put our own poetic concerns in perspective. Whether our current activity is evaluating Arizona's Language Management Act or, at a more personal level, deciding whether to plant lyric-conserving vegetation, the wiser choice would likely be made, if guided by an awareness that poetry is a very scarce and valuable natural resource.