THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON

A RESPONSE TO DANA GIOIA’S

“CAN POETRY MATTER?”

By Martin Lammon

“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 Wittenberg University, a professor told me that students should actually lose course credit for taking a creative writing class. That way, only the students who really loved to write would sign up. I was twenty years old, and after majoring in biology (I wanted to be a teacher and football coach), then political science (my girlfriend wanted me to be a lawyer), I’d discovered in my sophomore year what used to be known as a vocation. I would write poetry. I would teach writing and literature in a college or university. I didn’t care if the faculty discouraged me, or if I got credit or not. I had been called.

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 University of Georgia. In the Athens Banner-Herald (August 10, 1961), she granted that “high school students should be encouraged to write complete sentences, learn what nouns, pronouns and verbs are, and put a period at the end of a sentence,” but added that ‘‘fictional maturity comes rather late unless you are French and can write best-selling novels at 18. We Americans are a little backward.” The article quotes O’Connor as advising young writers to wait until “after you’ve published something” before deciding to become a writer. The article notes that O’Connor published her first story at age 20 (1946, in Accent), but does not mention that she herself received an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1947 after graduating in 1945 from the Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville.

G.S.C.W. is now GCSU (Georgia College & State University), my home since 1997. I don’t know what Flannery O’Connor would think of this Yankee directing an MFA program here, but I can guess. Still, like many critics of creative writing courses, O’Connor herself earned an MFA. Robert Bly won’t take less than $5,000 for a reading and workshop engagement.

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 Washington, D.C., Ethelbert Miller (Director of the African-American Resource Center at Howard University and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars) founded and directed the Ascension Poetry Reading Series in the 1970’s, creating opportunities for women writers and writers of color to read their works. The series lasted more than 25 years.

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 United States, other teachers and their students have visited local public schools and prisons, hosted community arts festivals, and staged rallies for all kinds of causes. In early 1993, Carolyn Forché of George Mason University and a former President of the Associated Writing Programs (now the Association of Writers and Writing Programs), published the anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W. W. Norton). About that book, Nelson Mandela wrote: “Poetry cannot block a bullet…but it can bear witness to brutality…. Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting is itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice. It bears witness to the evil we would prefer to forget, but never can—and never should.”

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.

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