The Trump regime’s cultural cuts have come for our poetry

But this year’s Poetry Out Loud anthology—the curated, online array of poems that high-school students learn by heart and perform in each year’s nationwide contest, which awards the champion with a $20,000 scholarship—does not include a single word by Naomi Shihab Nye, Yusef Komunyakaa, or Li-Young Lee.

That’s no accident. The POL anthology, for the first 20 years of the program, was a rich trove of classic and contemporary poems—everything from Shakespeare and Donne to recent poets laureate Billy Collins, Joy Harjo, and Ada Limón.

Takeovers and terminations

Then came Trump 2.0 and his attempt to lasso American arts to his ideological mission.

He took over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, booted Democrats from its traditionally bipartisan board and, just last week, illegally added his own name to its title.

He made Smithsonian curators twitchy enough to raise objections to the portrait of a trans woman in Statue-of-Liberty posture in painter Amy Sherald’s “American Sublime,” which led the artist to cancel her show at the National Portrait Gallery (and, by the way, take it up the road to the Baltimore Museum of Art).

And hundreds of arts and culture organizations across the US—including Philly’s own Wilma Theater, PlayPenn, and Quintessence Theatre Group—received e-mails from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) this spring referring to their previously-awarded grants with a terse subject line: Termination.

Out with the new, in with the old

It was just a matter of time until the changes hit Poetry Out Loud. For two decades, the program has been managed by the NEA and the nonprofit Poetry Foundation, which handled rights and permissions for the online anthology. But the foundation has shifted its focus to grantmaking, according to media manager Liz O’Connell-Thompson, and, for the first time this year, is no longer an active partner in running POL (though it continues as a funder).

Which means that this year’s anthology was curated by the NEA alone. The agency’s press office, in response to an e-mail, said no one was available for comment. But the stripped-down anthology speaks for itself. It includes only poems in the public domain, meaning their copyright has expired (typically 70 years after the author’s death or 95 years after the work’s first publication).

In other words, old.

In other words, mostly by white men. Some women, too: Elizabeth Bishop and Sara Teasdale and Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Gertrude Stein (shhh…maybe current NEA honchos don’t know that she was queer).

Still slightly subversive?

According to the new POL website—a nationalistic shadow of its former self, now in the palette of the American flag and nodding to the semiquincentennial (now say that 10 times fast)—the poems available for this year’s competition “highlight American poets as well as poems that embody the nation’s indomitable spirit, creativity [and] innovation.”

Interesting, because the indomitable spirit limned in “To the Ladies,” a public-domain poem by Lady Mary Chudleigh (“Wife and servant are the same,/But only differ in the name”) was zapped from the anthology.

Langston Hughes is in the catalogue, but gone is “I, Too,” his searing poem (also in the public domain) in which a Black man sent “to eat in the kitchen/when company comes” vows that those who shunned him will “see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed--/I, too, am America.”

To be sure, this year’s anthology includes a few slightly subversive poems, like Alice Duer Miller’s “A Suggested Campaign Song,” which pokes at the genteel euphemisms of the anti-suffrage movement. But a quick scan of the catalogue brings a kind of somnambulant detachment—the feeling that left me, in high school, with an allergy to poetry that wasn’t cured until I came across the fiery works of the Harlem Renaissance, mid-century beat poets, and second-wave literary feminists.

Poetry is alive

By shrinking the catalogue, the NEA has missed the chance to land an essential take-home on the heads of high school students nationwide: poetry is not dead. Poetry is alive and kicking; it’s being written, even as we speak, by a vast range of writers, some of them just a handful of years older than you are. It can jam in iambic pentameter or fracture into shards of rough, blank verse. It can use words like “dost” and “thine,” or it can croon vernacular so intimate it makes you blush.

In two decades, Poetry Out Loud reached more than 4.4 million students and 81,000 teachers from 20,000 schools across the country. That includes kids in tiny rural towns and giant suburban enclaves, across maraschino-red states and sky-blue ones. The group photograph of each year’s state champions could rival any Benetton ad for exuberant diversity. (The 2025 national champion was Bethlehem, PA 12th-grader Isavel Mendoza; watch his prize-winning performance above.)

Twenty years as a teaching artist

I’ve been a Poetry Out Loud teaching artist since 2005, working with high-school students everywhere from a tiny vocational-technical program in Vineland to Philly’s Central High School. Year after year, I’ve been moved: a disaffected jock cleaves to a World War I poem by Rupert Brooke; a shy kid stuns her classmates with a fierce performance of Toi Derricotte’s “Black Boys Play the Classics.”

Each year, I’ve told my students to browse the anthology with a mind open to surprise. But I’m often the one surprised by what they choose. There was a year when Shihab Nye’s “300 Goats” was a frequent pick; another year—credit the zeitgeist, or the “random poem” generator on the old website—I heard five different renditions of “Broken Promises” by David Kirby.

“The quadrennial choosing” looms

I’d love to know how the NEA chose the pieces in this year’s anthology; maybe they outsourced the task to AI with prompts to search for “God” and “hope” and “heaven,” words I spotted frequently as I skimmed through.

But AI’s not a perfect arbiter. And Walt Whitman’s “Election Day, November 1884,” somehow slipped the censorial eye. I hope one of this year’s state champions chooses that poem so that next April 29, the day of the 2026 Poetry Out Loud finals, in the shadow of the US Capitol, a high-school kid just old enough to vote will invoke Whitman’s tribute to a quintessentially American act, the bold, beleaguered idea at the root of the semiquincentennial (does it roll off your tongue yet?).

In that poem, Whitman enumerates the country’s many grandeurs—Niagara, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Great Lakes—then opines that the more potent “scene and show” happens every four years, “the still small voice vibrating—America’s choosing day,/(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing,)”

I hope the honchos at the NEA, or whatever’s left of it—hell, maybe even the Narcissist-in-Chief himself—will listen up.