Book examines poetry's importance
In the late 1980s, Dana Gioia resigned his executive position with a prominent high tech firm in Silicon Valley to begin writing poetry and literary essays, a life-long passion. Six years later, he published a book of essays based on an article written for Atlantic Monthly Magazine. That article, "Can Poetry Matter?"—and the book of the same name that followed—created a firestorm of controversy that continues to this day.
Gioia, now chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, asks why poetry has become so utterly disenfranchised from the general reading public. This phenomenon—the relegating of poetry to a small, privileged intellectual ghetto—would have been unheard of in any previous century. During the Elizabethan era (1558-1603), for example, the reading of poetry, particularly sonnets, was very much the rage. People read (and wrote) poetry with the same frequency and fervor with which we attend movies today. But in the modern age, reading poetry has become a private matter for a privileged, elite few. Today, rarely is poetry considered a subject of conversation. Those who do read it are reluctant to admit it for fear of seeming snobbish, intellectually pretentious, or downright strange.
The fault, Gioia believes, lies with the migration of poets into the world of academia that began in the 1970s. As a result, poets have established something that did not exist before—a clubby atmosphere with a secret handshake to which few outsiders are privy. Even worse, poets (now, suddenly, college teachers) have come under severe pressure to publish. The muse is rarely invoked. Instead, a cruel and relentless meter is running—the poet/instructor must publish at all costs almost without regard to nurturing his/her poems.
Gioia explains, "[Poets] must publish as much as possible, as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable."
As a result of poetry retreating behind the walls of academia, the discipline has become more and more insular. Today, poetry is written not for the common man, but for other poets. Often, poems seem written in a secret hieroglyphics decipherable only by other poets and often not even by them. Even worse, purveyors of such poetry have become judges and arbiters of what constitutes acceptable poetry today. For that reason, poetry of dubious value is often encouraged and championed rather than purged from a system that is protective and self-congratulatory.
What could possibly restore poetry to the wide-ranging esteem that it enjoyed only 50 or 60 years ago? These are among Gioia's more interesting recommendations:
- Poets who compile anthologies should be far more honest in including only those poems which they genuinely admire (rather than the lyrics of colleagues whose favor they are attempting to curry).
- Poetry teachers should spend less time on analysis and more on performance (thus encouraging creativity in the classroom).
- Poets should use the radio to expand their audience.
And yet for all its inherent interest, Gioia's now famous essay fails to ask an even more vital and fundamental question, namely "Does poetry matter?" rather than "Can poetry matter?" The distinction may seem slight, but the difference is immense. If all the poets in the world were suddenly to stop writing, would the world be able to tell? Would the world be a poorer place without the lyrics of Shakespeare or Mallarmé or Sappho? If every issue of Homer's Iliad were to be burned tomorrow at dawn, would there be expressions of dismay, any cries of horror and loss? If so, then why do we not turn more often to poetry for sustenance? And if we were to do so, what impact could this have on our humanity, our human insights, and our desire to reach others more faithfully than we do?
These are questions to be addressed by another book at another time. But Gioia's seminal essays draw our attention to the modern neglect of one of the most ancient, time-honored art forms known to humans.