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Essays on
poetry matters by Martin Lammon Poems,
interviews, essays, and more, featuring a poet who matters to me and, I hope,
to you A poem,
past or present, formal or free verse, that matters. Selected
correspondence from readers who matter Links to
Internet media articles on poetry, other news and events The web
pages of the print version of Arts & Letters |
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“If I, like Marianne Moore, could have my wish,
and I, like Solomon, could have the self-control not to wish for myself, I
would wish that poetry could again become a part of American public culture.
I don’t think this is impossible.” —Dana Gioia, “Can
Poetry Matter” 1991, The Atlantic Monthly At the end of his
essay “Can Poetry Matter?” Dana Gioia offers “six
modest proposals for how this dream might come true.” What those proposals revealed, however, was
just how out of touch Gioia was with what really
was happening across the country. For example, Gioia
asked poets to read not just their own works but “spend part of every program
reciting other people’s work.” James
Wright, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Maxine Kumin,
Allen Ginsberg, and many others taught us younger poets this lesson back in
the 1970’s and 1980’s. If Gioia was attending
readings where this practice wasn’t common, then perhaps he was merely
reflecting the company he kept. In further proposals,
he asks organizers of public readings to feature other arts, “especially
music,” and develop multi-event programs; he asks poets and arts
administrators to use radio. But many conferences and festivals (the Bucknell Poetry Festival for one) were featuring music,
art, lectures, and other programs long before Dana Gioia
decided to make such a “modest proposal.”
At the University of Missouri-Kansas City, New Letters
on the Air was broadcasting poetry readings and other
literary programs as early as 1977. Grace Cavalieri
hosted a weekly syndicated radio program on WPFW-FM, “The Poet and the Poem,”
from 1977-1997, presenting 2,000 poets to the nation, and later continued the
series once a year from the Library of Congress via NPR satellite. Perhaps Gioia wanted to see more of such practices, but his
rhetoric implies that his ideas were original and insightful. He’s like that
comic strip CEO, taking credit for Dilbert’s proposals. Of course, the
corporate world is where Gioia started before he
turned to poetry. In his most egregious
proposal, Dana Gioia begs the question regarding
the integrity of two fine poets, when he admonishes poet-editors to “be
scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire” and not
“pork barrels for the creative- writing trade.” Clearly, he is referring to the Morrow Anthology (edited by poets Dave
Smith and David Bottoms) that he had criticized earlier in his essay. I know
Smith and Bottoms, and I can vouch that they did not include any poem that at
least one of them did not “genuinely admire.”
Gioia might criticize these poets’ tastes,
but when I review the web sites, anthologies, conferences, and other venues
where his name consistently appears, I find a similarly definable list of
poets and writers linked to him. One could, I suppose, even call such a list
its own “subculture,” the term Gioia applies to
contemporary poets usually linked to university writing programs. When I first read Gioia’s
essay back in 1991, a part of me wanted to agree with him. But when I reread
the essay, I was 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. Finally, Gioia’s
idea of what mattered was
determined first by how many people bought poetry books and literary
journals, as if applying the logic of Nielsen ratings to poetry. Second,
given that the numbers for poetry and the other literary arts would never
challenge the “mass audience” of popular culture, Gioia
would settle for how many of the right
people cared about poetry. If you were the editor of The New York Times Book Review, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist,
or a priest at St. Mark’s, you mattered.
If you were a 25 year-old aspiring poet in an MFA program, or a high school
English teacher, you did not matter, although apparently you were welcome to
pay $450 to attend poetry writing workshops with Gioia
and his friends in Sonoma, California, at the “Teaching Poetry Conference”
(“the heart of wine country,” boasted the conference’s promotional material).
Gioia
claimed that one “can see a microcosm of poetry’s current position by
studying its coverage in The New York
Times”; that lack of coverage, Gioia concluded,
“only reflects 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.” While The
New York Times is certainly an important newspaper, it is hardly a
“microcosm” by which to observe the state of American poetry, unless one’s
point of view resembles the solopsistic New Yorker cover depicting a map of
the United States in which New York City towers over smaller outposts such as
Boston, and looms over an entire Midwest shrunk to the size of a grassy
highway median strip. It is telling, too, that Gioia
included advertisers in his list of groups to whom poetry did not matter.
Clearly, one way Gioia assessed the value of poetry
in this country was to observe its commercial influence in a consumerist
society. Gioia also
observed that the decline of poetry had been addressed for the last half
century, ranging from Edmund Wilson in 1934 (“Is Verse a Dying Technique?”)
to Joseph Epstein in 1988 (“Who Killed Poetry?”). Gioia
reported how Epstein “contrasted the major achievements of the modernists—the
generation of Eliot and Stevens, which led poetry from moribund Romanticism
into the Twentieth Century—with what he felt were the minor accomplishments
of the present practitioners.” Here
one sees the kind of poet and poetry that Gioia
prefers, a preference generally confirmed by other essays he writes, where he
often appeals to Eliot, Pound, Frost, and other early twentieth-century
literary lions as exemplary for what’s missing in contemporary poets and
poetry. I’ve been
dealing with critics such as Gioia for as long as I
can remember. In the late seventies and early eighties, poets such as Robert
Bly and Donald Hall criticized their contemporaries and juniors for being
timid or unambitious. In 1978, when I was an
undergraduate at That was 30 years ago and (as Gioia
correctly points out) the litany of criticism goes back a lot further. There
were plenty pre-1978 critics who damned creative writing courses. In 1961,
Flannery O’Connor addressed the Fifth Southern Writers Workshop at the G.S.C.W. is now GCSU ( Dana Gioia faults the professionalization
of poetry, acknowledging a “poetry boom” that exploded in the 1980’s but
declaring that “boom” a “distressingly confined phenomenon”: Decades
of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the
production and reception of new poetry, comprising legions of teachers,
graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in
universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for
contemporary verse. Here’s where opinion
becomes dangerous. In 1991, Dana Gioia criticized
how “public and private funding created a large professional class” of poets,
and links most of that funding to “universities.” In January 2003, Gioia was unanimously confirmed as the new chair of the
National Endowment for the Arts. Clearly, our NEA chair has better plans for
the endowment’s “public funding.” The
problem is, when he refers to “legions of teachers, graduate students,
editors, publishers, and administrators” he doesn’t seem to know the people he’s talking about. Since the 1970’s, the
demographics of American poetry have changed dramatically, and it was
university writing programs that helped make that change possible. Many of
the strongest voices in American poetry over the past 25 years belong to men
and women from cultural backgrounds mostly absent from mainstream American
poetry before 1970. Poets such as Lucille Clifton, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Rita Dove, Carolyn Forché,
Margaret Gibson, Joy Harjo, June Jordan, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sonia Sanchez, Cathy Song, and many others
have become prominent. So, too, have Jimmy Santiago Baca, Cornelius Eady, Garret Hongo, Yusef Komunyakaa, Li-Young Lee,
Ethelbert Miller, Carl Phillips, Alberto Rios, and dozens more. Critics of
creative writing programs lament the thousands of people studying poetry,
teaching poetry. What those critics do not discuss is how creative writing
programs have helped to introduce and nurture poets and other writers whose
voices would have never been heard in earlier generations. Dana Gioia cites over and over the names of such high
modernists as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams,
Wallace Stevens, and others, almost all of whom, we are reminded, earned their
livings outside the academy as bankers, entrepreneurs, farmers,
pediatricians, insurance executives. They also wrote essays about poetry. In
“Can Poetry Matter?” (and elsewhere), Gioia has
applauded the poet as critic, citing the names of poets that “represent a
high point in American intellectual life…John Berryman, R. P. Blackmur, Louise Bogan, John
Ciardi, Horace Gregory, Langston Hughes, Randall Jarrell, Weldon Kees, Kenneth Rexroth, Delmore
Schwartz, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, and Yvor
Winters.” These dozen men (and one
woman), were “like all genuine intellectuals… visionary,” critics who
“believed that if modern poets did not have an audience, they could create
one.” One might grant Gioia a little leeway here. But in his book Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture,
the face that Dana Gioia puts on modern and
contemporary American poetry does not change. His essays and reviews address
the work of Robinson Jeffers, Weldon Kees, Ted Kooser, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Bly, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Jared Carter, James Dickey, Tom
Disch, Maxine Kumin,
Radcliffe Squires, Theodore Weiss, Howard Moss, Donald Justice, and Elizabeth
Bishop. Even in essays that address some general topic, Gioia’s
lists of poets are revealing. “It is instructive,” he writes, “to consider
how many contemporary poets have achieved important reputations almost solely
on short poems: Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Weldon Kees,
James Wright, Sylvia Plath, Robert Graves, Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, Adrienne Rich, Howard Moss, Louis Simpson, J. V.
Cunningham, Philip Larkin, Charles Tomlinson, W. S. Merwin,
William Stafford” (“The Dilemma of the Long Poem,” originally published in The Kenyon Review, 1983). In essay after essay,
Dana Gioia rounds up the usual suspects. In a book
that claims to offer essays on “Poetry and American Culture,” Gioia’s own vision of what’s American
is reactionary, not visionary. Before her death in
2002, June Jordan taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she
founded her “Poetry for the People” class, devoted to breaking barriers
between artists and audiences, holding public readings throughout the San
Francisco Bay area, and advocating political activism. In 1995, the class
inspired the book June Jordan's Poetry for
the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint (Routledge),
and groups across the country have duplicated her model. In Jordan and Miller
represent just two examples of how truly visionary poets, both connected to
colleges and universities, have reached out into their communities. Across
the In 1978, Robert Bly
(in an Ohio Review interview)
blamed universities and the NEA for domesticating American Poetry. “When the
government gives money,” he claimed, “it results in domestication of the
poet. I think that the National Endowment is an even worse catastrophe, in
the long run, to the ecology of poetry than the universities.” Ironically, writing in The Hudson Review (1987) about “The
Successful Career of Robert Bly,” Dana Gioia
criticizes the iconoclastic poet. Referring to commentary that Bly had
included in his 1986 Selected Poems, Gioia
comments that “one should not be too surprised”: It
is just that gift for self-marketing that has built Bly’s successful career.
Some readers enjoy the sales pitch enough to accept the poetry on faith. I
advise a more critical reading of these Selected
Poems. …Bly’s best poems make this volume worth the
effort, but, unfortunately, it is an effort. And so I will also
advise a more “critical reading” of our current NEA chair’s take on
contemporary poetry and American Culture. The bottom line? Gioia stands at
the head of a subculture much older than university creative writing
programs. It is a corporate boardroom culture, an exclusive fraternity with a
“gift for self-marketing” that knows how to undercut the competition. Consumers, readers,
take care. Caveat emptor…caveat lector. Return to Arts & Letters:
Poetry Matters Go
to Reader Response to make a comment |
Martin Lammon,
editor of Arts & Letters, is
the author of News from Where I Live:
Poems ( Notes From
Milledgeville Archive |
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