Andrew Carroll, Johnny Appleseed

Johnny Appleseed  When Andrew Carroll was a junior at Columbia University, a friend gave him a copy of a speech by Joseph Brodsky. Carroll was studying English literature at the time, but he had chosen the major for purely utilitarian reasons -- his ambition was to become a movie and television producer, and he had heard that a well-rounded humanities background would help toward that end. He was not a poetry aficionado, and he did not know who Brodsky was. "My best guess was that he was a cosmonaut," Carroll recalls. "The name was vaguely familiar, and I was thinking, Russian, he's either a famous chess player or a cosmonaut." But the speech by the Nobel Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate ended up changing Carroll's life.

Brodsky declaimed that poetry should be available everywhere, that "an anthology of American poetry should be found in the drawer in every room in every motel of the land." Carroll was moved to write to Brodsky, who, much to Carroll's surprise, replied, suggesting they meet. For the next year or so, they rendezvoused at Maurizio's Café in Greenwich Village and hatched a plan. In 1993, they created a not-for-profit organization called the American Poetry & Literacy (APL) Project, and they approached hotels and publishers, hoping to realize their dream of placing poetry books next to Gideon Bibles. The initial reaction was less than enthusiastic. One hotel manager said, "Who's this Robert Frost you work for?" But then Doubletree Hotels consented, and the Book-of-the-Month Club agreed to donate an astounding ten thousand copies of the anthology
Six American Poets.

The project has flourished since then, distributing over 125,000 free books of poetry in various cities and locales, ranging far beyond the drawers of hotel rooms to Amtrak trains, airports, homeless shelters, and vehicle inspection stations. The reception has been overwhelmingly positive, although occasionally people are wary about accepting a book from a stranger. "They often think, This is some sort of weird cult, isn't it?" Carroll reports. "But once they know there're no strings attached, they'll ask for more copies." Word has spread, and the APL Project has been inundated with requests for copies, particularly from schools and literacy centers. "It's just exploded," Carroll says. "We can't keep up with the demand." Brodsky died of a heart attack in 1996, but Carroll has carried on as the organization's executive director in Washington, D.C., with a handful of volunteers. He has been a tireless missionary, not even receiving a salary until last July, when a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas
Foundation made a stipend possible.

As we go to press, Carroll, who is now twenty-eight, is preparing for his most ambitious project to date: to drive from New York to San Francisco in April, handing out 100,000 free books of poetry along the way. Coordinated by the Academy of American Poets during the third annual National Poetry Month, the trip is being called the Great APLseed Giveaway, and lists the Washington State Apple Growers among its funders. In his donated Ryder truck, Carroll will stop at supermarkets, jury waiting rooms, libraries, late-night diners, prisons, and shopping malls, giving away Dover Publications editions of
101 Great American Poems and
African-American Poetry, as well as other anthologies. Carroll is a bit apprehensive about the cross-country tour, since he has never driven more than four hundred miles at a stretch, and he did flunk his driving test three times as a sixteen-year-old. But he relishes this opportunity to go out into the field, gathering new ideas about how to make poetry a part of everyday life. One suggestion, for instance, recently came out of the blue: Why not print poems in the phone book? "My God," Carroll reflects, "we'd been saying for years that we want to make poetry as ubiquitous as phone books, and we'd never put the two of them together." He contacted a few phone-book publishers, and now, in some Yellow Pages, there is Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" under the heading
Travel, and Emily Dickinson's "I Died for Beauty" under
Insurance.

Some have questioned why the APL Project concentrates so much on the standard canon and on not contemporary poetry, and also have asked if poetry in general -- considering its putative difficulty -- can be effective as a literacy tool. "What's so extraordinary about classic American poetry is its disarming simplicity," Carroll explains. "It's very accessible for people of different backgrounds and reading levels. And actually that kind of poetry, with its rhyme and meter, is the best way to be introduced to language. People can get into the music of the words, even though they may not fully understand them. That's why poetry resonates, because there is a depth to it. Everyone finds something different in poetry -- solace, inspiration, catharsis. But for me, the greatest thing about poetry is that we live in this incredibly fast-paced technological society, and poetry forces us to slow down and focus on what's meaningful -- passion, and craftsmanship, whimsy, imagination, creativity, humanity."

Carroll has also edited an anthology,
Letters of a Nation: A Collection of Extraordinary American Letters (Kodansha), the proceeds for which support the APL Project. The book contains over two hundred epistles, from 1630 to 1996, by the famous and the obscure. It took Carroll over six years to accumulate them all, inspired after his family home burned down and he lost his own letters. The work was difficult, especially since he is not an historian: "I have this odd tendency of picking projects I don't know much about and then immersing myself in them. But there is a connection between letters and poems. They're probably the two most egalitarian art forms we have. Anyone with a piece of paper and a pen can sit down and create a masterpiece."

With his seemingly boundless energy, Carroll is pursuing many plans for the future. He would like to raise enough money to distribute a total of one million poetry books by the millennium, put a book in every hotel and motel room in Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, and get an astronaut to read poems on the Space Shuttle. Sometime or another, Carroll's full-time participation with the project will end, as he wants to teach high school English, but he will ensure that the endeavor continues:

"I can't begin to tell you how great it is to give out free books to people, books that will have a real impact."