Arts programs are kaput, libraries are being shuttered, K-12 education has plummeted, and literacy rates are down. And California has been without a state bard for nearly two years.

Q:Who ya gonna call?

A:Somebody who can rhyme and doesn't need a dime.

Reviving an idea California started in 1915 - and since followed by 35 other states - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California Arts Council are in hot pursuit of a state poet laureate. The bard will serve for two years and must perform a minimum of six public readings and undertake a significant cultural project - all in a state that spends only three cents per resident per year on the arts.

The search reveals the sagging fortunes of literacy in the land of John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, and the 1960s San Francisco "beat" poets. Art aficionados hope that the new post may reverse that downward spiral by spreading the power of poetry from school to nursing home, lunchroom to boardroom - without much pay.

"The person we choose will be limited only by the imagination," says Adam Gottlieb, spokesman for the California Arts Council (CAC), which is actively pursuing published resident California writers and poets. "They could open a legislative session, throw out the first baseball or wrap a poem around Catalina Island if they want."

Since California appointed the nation's first poet laureate in 1915, 35 other states have established similar positions as ways to capture each state's unique heritage in verse. And according to Maggie Anderson, director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University, the state poet laureates have been highly successful at doing just that.

"They bring a state identity to a region," she says. "They have been quite successful in helping to catalyze ways in which people in a state can read, and write, and perform poetry, and represent the achievements of that state to the nation as a whole."

But some say in a culture of financial cutbacks - the CAC recently lost 97 percent of its budget - a Golden State poet would be nothing more than a feel-good gesture.

"The idea of a poet laureate is always a kind of token position which is good in that the state recognizes the value of poetry, but it comes at the same time they have obliterated the budget that funds smaller arts organizations that often embrace poetry," says Steve Dickison, executive director of The Poetry Center, an American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University.

Indeed, laureates across the nation have long grappled with their poetic purpose.

"We are an extremely obscure and undervalued group of people," says Tom Chandler, poet laureate of Rhode Island, who attended the first national conference for his other state colleagues just last year.

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