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Martin Lammon What Matters |
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As I write, it is June, four months before the
fall Arts & Letters will be
printed and ready for distribution in November. When I count back to issue
one, I am astonished to realize that Arts
& Letters debuted only fifteen months ago, in March of 1999. Since our first year, as promised, we have
published an eclectic range of literature, commentary, and artwork, featuring
contributors both new and distinguished. I am pleased to announce that Robert
Gibb has won a Pushcart Prize for his poem “Folding the Fox” published in our
fall 1999 issue and scheduled for reprinting in the fall anthology The Pushcart Prize XXV: Best of the Small
Presses, 2001 Edition. Congratulations to Gibb for this honor. The Arts
& Letters tradition of excellence continues in this our fourth issue,
which includes new work by Don Mee Choi, Xue Di,
Karen Kunc, Charles Simic,
Liz Waldner, and Miller Williams, among others. Readers
will enjoy Denise Low’s recollection of the Bardo “Death
Journey” of novelist William Burroughs, accompanied by remarkable images of
Burroughs by his official photographer Jon Blumb
(whose photograph of the Bardo bonfire is featured
on our cover). Edward Bok Lee’s interview with Xue Di provides insight into
the Chinese dissident poet’s work in exile but also his ongoing connection to
contemporary And then there is Dinty
Moore’s eyewitness account of Nelson Algren’s
shorts. * This summer, as I write, I am thinking again
about Dana Gioia’s Atlantic Monthly essay “Can Poetry Matter?” (May 1991). Actually,
I’ve been thinking about that essay for the last decade—a proper span of time
to reflect upon an inquisitor’s question and attempt a response. Like many
polemical essayists, Gioia was both right and wrong
depending upon your point of view. Gioia wrote that one could “see a microcosm of
poetry’s current position by studying its coverage in The New York Times,” where the lack of coverage reflected “the
opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none of it
matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers—to anyone, that is,
except other poets.” Essentially, Gioia’s viewpoint
came down to two arguments: 1) that only other poets valued poetry; and 2)
that poetry lacked commercial or political clout. What mattered was measured by numbers of books sold and how much (or
in this case, how little) the culture invested in poetry. Other arts were
represented by concert halls, museums, and fine arts centers. Symphonies,
exhibitions, and the ballet attracted millions of dollars in private
foundation and government support, drew thousands of patrons, and received
significant coverage in newspapers, magazines, and even television. In the
literary realm alone, poetry was unimportant compared to novels, which might
have tens or hundreds of thousands of copies in print, compared to a book of
poems which might be published in an edition of fewer than one thousand
copies. Who among poets could stand againt Stephen
King, or Joyce Carol Oates? Who can argue with Gioia?
The new Mapplethorpe exhibit will “matter” more than the contemporary reading
series at the public library. Mapplethorpe will generate a hundred times more
money, more media attention, and more attendance than the poetry series will.
And the numbers will prove what matters in our contemporary culture. Gioia granted that individual poets might have lucrative
and influential positions in academia, but in the general commercial and
political realm, where numbers represented sales and opinion polls, poetry did not matter. * In March, Arts
& Letters celebrated its second annual spring festival, featuring
Miller Williams, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Jaimy Gordon, Billy Collins, Juergen
Strunck, and Marion Dane Bauer. Attendance at
readings ranged from fifty to one hundred people. Strunck
and Gordon worked closely with our university’s creative writing and arts
students, while Marion Dane Bauer worked with children, local public school
teachers, and the university’s teachers-in-training. The general public
attended workshops, lectures, and exhibitions, traveling to Milledgeville
from throughout In May, we hosted our first Arts & Letters Creative Writing
Workshops, featuring Bret Lott, Margaret Gibson, and Dinty
Moore, as well as the A&L
editorial staff. Again, our numbers were more intimate, but writers from
thirteen different states and the This year, as we publish our fourth and fifth
issues, Arts & Letters will
have paid regular contributors and contest judges about $10,000 in honoraria.
Our 1999 and 2000 prize winners in fiction, poetry, and drama will have
received awards totaling $6,000. That’s $16,000 to Arts & Letters writers since the spring of 1999. If I were to
total up the honoraria to visiting writers, writers-in-residence, and special
workshops faculty, that figure would nearly quadruple. Even so, compared to
financial figures associated with the Atlanta Symphony or * In 1991, Dana Gioia lamented that the general
public did not read or value poetry anymore. He argued that, although
individual poets were never best-sellers (despite exceptional sales by such
poets as E. A. Robinson, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost), readers eagerly
awaited the latest edition of Louis Untermeyer’s or
Oscar Williams’s famous anthologies of poetry published in the first half of
the Twentieth Century. At the end of his essay, Gioia
made six “modest proposals,” all of which were directed towards ways of
making poetry more sensitive and more accessible to a larger public audience.
There is a large part of me that wanted back then and wants even now to
agree with Gioia. But whenever I reread his essay,
I am uneasy with the way his argument focused on poetry’s unimportance to the
larger and more powerful forces of advertisers, publishers, and the
commercial media. Furthermore, Gioia reveals his
nostalgia for the modernist era. He concedes that poets never really had a “mass
audience,” but he is more impressed with the way they had created in the
first half of the Twentieth Century an audience that included a “cross-section
of artists and intellectuals, including scientists, clergymen, educators,
lawyers, and, of course, writers.” Gioia longed for
that elite audience who “constituted a literary intelligentsia, made up
mainly of nonspecialistists [presumably those
artists, intellectuals, scientists, clergymen, educators, lawyers, and “of
course, writers”], who took poetry as seriously as fiction and drama.” I think that, finally, Gioia’s
idea of what mattered was
determined first by how many people bought poetry books and literary
journals; and second, given that the numbers for poetry and the other literary
arts would never challenge the “mass audience” of popular culture, by how
many of the right people cared
about poetry (and presumably other marginalized artistic forms). If you were
the editor of The New York Times Book
Review, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, or a priest at Lee LaMarr told me that
his week in Milledgeville for the May workshops was “life-changing.” That man’s
story, however, did not appear in The
New York Times. His story did not even appear in The Atlanta Journal & Constitution. Lee is just one man from What finally bothers me about Dana Gioia’s essay is this: At the heart of his arguments, Lee
LaMarr does not matter. * At the May 2000 Creative Writing Workshops, Arts & Letters awarded four
full-tuition ($599) fellowships to Jeff Bens of North Carolina, Elizabeth Kerlikowske of Michigan, John McKernan
of West Virginia, and Elly Williams of Maryland. Both
the Arts & Letters spring
festival and May workshops will continue in 2001. Both matter. In this issue, I am proud to recognize our 2000
Arts & Letters prizes winners
and honorable mention selections. In poetry, Frances Mayes selected poems by
Ann Pelletier as our poetry winner. In addition, Mayes singled out poems for
honorable mention by Mary Elizabeth Parker, Jane R. Shippen,
Anthony Russell White, and Margaret Young. In fiction, judge Janet Kauffman
chose for honorable mention stories by Andraya Dolbee and Austin Ratner which
appear in this issue. Kauffman chose Harry Bloom’s short story “Shapes” as
the winner of our second annual competition. I want our readers to know the story behind
Harry Bloom, who passed away in 1996. Harry taught for many years at SUC
Oneonta in Of course, given Dana Gioia’s
argument, Bloom’s story does not matter. * Our poetry and fiction winners receive a $1,000
prize, and they and our final judges will also be our guests October 27-29
for our first Arts & Letters
prizes weekend. I am also pleased to announce that our final
judge in drama, Christopher Durang, has selected “Starfish
Memories” by Roy Sorrels, whose one-act play will appear in the spring 2001
issue of Arts & Letters. The
editors are planning to produce the play at the spring Arts & Letters festival, * I want to thank Christopher Durang,
Janet Kauffman, and Frances Mayes for their careful reading and judgment. I
apologize to them if their hard work does not matter. I hope that our judges, our contributors, and
our readers can join with the editors of Arts
& Letters to help spread the word about what matters. Tell the editor
at your newspaper. Tell your local librarian. Tell the owner of your local
bookstore. Tell the National Endowment for the Arts. Here are dates again to
remember: Arts
& Letters #4 published Arts
& Letters #5 published Tell your neighbors. They don’t even have to be
poets or writers. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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