From the issue dated September 27, 2002
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10 Years After, Poetry Still MattersBy JOHN PALATTELLATen years ago this fall, an executive who had managed the Jell-O account at General Foods published a collection of essays about American poetry. Its contents included a debunking of Robert Bly, a defense of Weldon Kees, an appreciation of Robinson Jeffers, and a clutch of short reviews. But one essay overshadowed all the others, and its opening paragraph was routinely quoted. "American poetry now belongs to a subculture," argued Dana Gioia in Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture. "No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible." Gioia was surely casting a backward glance at those excellent American poets (Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, and Jack Spicer, to name just a few) who were respected by their peers yet died with much of their work out of print or unpublished, wasn't he? Gioia pointed his finger at university-based creative-writing programs, which he compared to a pork-barrel agricultural concern: "Like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry industry had been created to serve the interests of the producers and not the consumers." Gioia's charges hardly went unnoticed. When they first appeared, in a 1991 article in The Atlantic Monthly, the magazine received about 200 pieces of mail in response, a volume that matched the huge response to Dinesh D'Souza's article on illiberal education in March of that year. The book version of Can Poetry Matter? became a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism and received many favorable reviews, with one commentator adding a dollop of relevance by invoking the opening phrase of Marianne Moore's "Poetry": "I, too, dislike it." Some writers are still irritated by Gioia's argument. Now Graywolf Press has published a 10th-anniversary edition of Can Poetry Matter?, and Gioia has chosen to leave his text unrevised. He has added only a short introduction, mostly a reprise of a 1992 essay he published in Britain's Poetry Review. One can't help but wonder if the anniversary edition is commemorating not longevity but obsolescence, since certain developments over the last decade have turned the title essay's argument into a historical curiosity. One such development is the growth of spoken-word poetry. With contemporary origins reaching back to the founding of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City in 1974, spoken word spread rapidly during the 1990s, reviving popular interest in poetry in general and reinvigorating, to some extent, the art's vocal roots. As Gioia himself notes in his introduction, spoken word is but one example of the kind of literary activity that previously existed only in urban milieus and "is now found in hundreds of cities across the country." Another development is the Internet, which Gioia credits with fostering "an immense amount of activity -- from mainstream sites like Poetry Daily to more specialized online journals, literary home pages, and chat rooms." In some other respects, however, the title essay of Can Poetry Matter? still seems relevant, since several of the symptoms it describes have remained widespread. Gioia singles out The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (1985) as an example of poetry's professionalization and insularity, claiming that the 800-page reader was less a literary collection than "a comprehensive directory of creative-writing teachers." The same could be said of Poetry 180, a poem-a-day syllabus for high-school students that the poet laureate Billy Collins began assembling this year (http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180). Collins has selected the poems from back issues of contemporary poetry journals stored in his attic; of the more than 100 poets whose work appears in Poetry 180, most have been educated or employed by creative-writing programs. Like the Morrow volume, Poetry 180 teems with specimens of what Donald Hall once labeled the "McPoem": a descriptive, anecdotal, and often-autobiographical piece of verse with a very narrow emotional and linguistic range. "To produce the McPoem, institutions must enforce patterns," Hall explained in "Poetry and Ambition" in 1983. "The McPoem is the product of the workshops of Hamburger University." Collins's own work is ruthlessly formulaic -- the typical item being an anecdotal, discursive poem about an event that revolves around a solipsist who is whimsical, timid, and occasionally impertinent -- so it's hardly a surprise that he has packed Poetry 180 with McPoems. Just as important, some changes in the poetry world have reinforced Gioia's argument. The most notable is that the experimental-poetry fringe is now a university-based operation as well, and no less formulaic. Its model product? The Verse-a-Matic, a messy contraption that, powered by philosophical worrying about the nature of language, slices and dices any discourse down to size and recombines it with other linguistic fragments into a novel poetic form, which of course is not to be mistaken for a poem. If you spend a little time today with the title essay of Can Poetry Matter?, however, you may begin to wonder what exactly the fuss was all about, and whether Gioia's thesis can be of any help in understanding how poetry is professionalized. You might even find the rest of the line from Marianne Moore's "Poetry" springing to mind: "there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle." One problem is that Gioia favors phrases like "decline in cultural importance," "most readers now assume," and "diminished stature," letting them hover free of time, place, circumstance, or definition. Similarly, analogies meant to be provocative are just bombastic. Take the comparison of creative-writing programs to government-subsidized farms. Since when, as Gioia suggests, has a poet's primary obligation been to serve the interests of consumers? I don't mean to imply that poets don't desire an audience. But isn't the first duty of all poets not to readers but to language, their own as well as their culture's? And would it be so terrible if the only readers of a poet's work at any one time were other poets, especially if those readers grasped, appreciated, and promoted the work? Some of Gioia's larger claims are just as dubious. It's certainly true that, as he writes, relative to other books "there is little coverage of poetry books or poets in the general press." But it doesn't necessarily follow that poetry doesn't matter much to "readers, publishers, or advertisers -- to any-one, that is, except other poets." The fog machine here is Gioia's decision to lump together the interests of readers with those of publishers and advertisers, and thereby to treat book reviews in the mass media as an accurate index of readers' interest in poetry. For decades, the staples of book-review sections have been pieces about the big-ticket items that publishers (both trade and university-press) hope will net a handsome return on investment: fiction (lead titles more than midlist), biography, history, politics, mystery, and young people's literature (what used to be called "children's books"). When works outside those genres are reviewed -- not just volumes of poetry, but books about film, physics, geology, art history, archaeology, chemistry, economics, mathematics, or philosophy -- it's usually because they can be pegged to a current event or floated on the latest wave of pop ephemera. But one shouldn't conclude that only poets are interested in Lorine Niedecker because The New York Times neglected to review the long-awaited volume Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works. Gioia is just as murky when developing his main argument -- that poetry has been killed by a professional class of creative writers. Even a decade ago, he was hardly the first to argue that vassalage to the university had diminished poets' creative and intellectual ambitions. The peculiar turns of his argument, however, are a bit original. At one point, he drops the murder charge and suggests that poetry is dying from natural causes, citing as evidence Edmund Wilson's 1934 essay "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Wilson argued that since the late 18th century, the refinement of the lyric has led poets to forsake history and satire as suitable subjects, thereby narrowing poetry's popular appeal and intellectual scope. "The trouble is today that no verse technique is more obsolete than blank verse," Wilson complained. Had Wilson not been transfixed by his vision of the Good Old Days, perhaps he would have found the time to have read the remarkable blank verse that Wallace Stevens was writing at the time. Gioia himself admits that Wilson was guilty of making blinkered aesthetic judgments, but he nonetheless affirms that Wilson's sense of poetry's overall situation was depressingly astute. If that's true, then creative-writing programs are not the cause but merely a symptom of the rot that set in over two centuries ago. Yet elsewhere, Gioia sounds even less like an eulogist than a stoic. In a 1995 interview about Can Poetry Matter?, he observed, "The current state of literature is always dismal, yet literature gloriously survives." In other words, though its scale may change, mediocre verse is always with us; whereas it was once the product of a cottage industry, today it happens to be mass-produced. That's an interesting observation, if only because it dampens the powder of Gioia's polemic about creative-writing programs. A more interesting question is why, if the powder was wet, was the polemic so explosive? Why did an attack on college writing programs generate so much interest? Gioia has talked about the correspondence he received on his book, and based on what he's said, it's clear that some of his fans harbored a deep hatred of the university, a sort of intellectual anti-clericalism. That they gravitated to Gioia isn't surprising, since the culture wars were still raging in the early 1990s. That was a time when some academics (deservedly so) were branded Brahmins and clergy -- those, at least, being the synonyms this newspaper can print. In fact, having appointed himself a proxy of the popular will with phrases like "most readers now assume," Gioia happily enlisted in the perennial American kultur-kampf of "the people" clashing with a treacherous, elitist establishment. But Gioia and his supporters can cling to the hackneyed script of the culture wars, even long after the last major skirmishes have been fought, only by ignoring the fact that romantic rebellion has never been more impossible. The poetry world is just too diffuse. In 1991, the year Gioia's argument appeared in the Atlantic, nearly 5,000 poets were listed in A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers. According to the Directory of American Poetry Books, which is maintained by Poets House, in New York City, nearly 7,000 volumes of poetry were published in the United States from 1990 to 2001. (That figure excludes poetry CD's, audiotapes and videotapes, and other multimedia recordings of poetry.) The situation in the mid-20th century, which Gioia treats as a golden age of poetry-writing and poetry-reviewing, was considerably different. According to a bibliography published in the magazine Accent, there were 151 American poets in 1941; from 1931 to 1940, they published a total of 264 books of poetry (excluding doggerel and inspirational verse). Commenting on those Accent figures in 1989, in an essay later collected in Outside Stories, 1987-1991, the essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger offered an explanation that remains sound today: American poetry "was once a village where neighbors chatted and feuded. Now American poetry is a little nation of citizens who are unknown to each other, a federation of cantons where the passes are snowed in and the wires are down." Even Gioia now inhabits one of those cantons, for, since 2001, he has taught in Sonoma, Calif., at the Teaching Poetry Institute, which conducts creative-writing workshops -- yes, workshops -- for teachers and writers. Not all of the wires have remained down, since the Internet has not only facilitated communication among cantons but also opened up territory for new cantons. But the poetry world is still a federation, not a republic, and whether its decentralization has fostered pluralism or balkanization remains an open question. What's certain is that, given the changes in the country's demographics, the rise of mass university education, and the growth of poetry as a middle-class profession, that little mid-century village has vanished for good. Perhaps the term that best sums up the current state of affairs is motley -- a mix of dazzling, foolish, and banal work that cuts across styles, movements, and schools. The murky certainties of the title essay of Can Poetry Matter? have grown only murkier in 10 years' time, which is why wandering around a motley poetry world remains more appealing to me than the solicitude of Dana Gioia. John Palattella is a writer who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 5, Page B13
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education