A year into his tenure as president of the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, Wall Street veteran John Barr continues to balance the demands of pitching poetry to a seemingly indifferent public while serving as steward of a $100 million gift from the estate of heiress Ruth Lilly, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

The 2002 gift from Lilly to Poetry magazine made the now two-year-old Poetry Foundation the wealthiest literary organization in the nation. Barr, who joined the foundation last February, unveiled a new strategic plan for the organization in September. Among other things, it calls for a new national survey of people's attitudes toward poetry; persuading newspapers, magazines, and broadcast outlets to devote more time to poetry; the establishment of several new prizes, including one for humorous work and one for work by "neglected masters"; and the creation of a poetry recitation program similar to the national spelling bee, with competitions at the local, state, and national level.

But many in the poetry world wonder whether Barr, a published poet himself, will need to come up more creative ways to interest Americans in poetry, and why, given the size of the Lilly gift, he has no plans to help individual poets. Still others wonder whether the former investment banker can successfully navigate the transition from the bottom-line-driven world of Wall Street to the nonprofit sector. The two spheres operate in vastly different ways, the Monitor notes, and "learning a whole new set of rules is not as easy as it looks."

Barr is undaunted by the challenge. A former member of the boards of Yaddo and Bennington College and a past president of the Poetry Society of America, he talks about poetry with passion and conviction. "We want to be uncommonly good at discovering the best poetry. We don't want to celebrate the status quo," Barr told the Monitor. At the same time, he adds, "we want to get work out there in front of people, placing it before the largest audience possible."