Can Poetry Matter? Part I

“Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around—not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition’s sake.”

Dana Gioia, “Can Poetry Matter?” (1992)

Poetry, as we concluded last Monday, qua Auden, “makes nothing happen.” Instead, it “survives/ In the valley of its saying, where executives/ Would never want to tamper,” providing us solace in the “raw towns” of “isolation” and “busy griefs” that “we believe and die in.” If Dana Gioia is right, though, poetry is providing that solace to fewer and fewer people, surviving, if that description is still even apt, on the life support of creative writing programs and English Departments.

But let’s first pause and note the irony that Gioia, a well-known American poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was also a former corporate executive at General Foods. So whereas Auden celebrated that poetry would remain beyond the grasp of executives, for Gioia, the problem is that all too few executives can be bothered to tamper with it.

In his influential essay, “Can Poetry Matter,” which originally appeared in the April 1991 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Gioia lamented the marginal space poetry occupied in the contemporary art and intellectual world. This was intended to be a surprising claim since poetry appeared to be anything but marginal. Indeed, from a certain perspective, it appeared to be thriving. Just under a thousand new volumes of poetry appeared every year, and anthologies and literary magazines published still more poetry. Moreover, roughly 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States and more than 1,000 undergraduate ones provided several thousand jobs for poets and several tens of thousands of homes for aspiring poets. What’s more, poets and aspiring poets alike were supported by grants and fellowships offered by federal, state, and local arts programs as well as by private foundations. In short, given the number of resources devoted to it, “an observer might easily conclude that we live in a golden age of American poetry.”

Not so, Gioia charges, because despite all the resources devoted to it, American poetry is “no longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life.” It has become, instead, “the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group.” Indeed, Gioai elsewhere compares the poetry world to “subsidized farming,” which “grows food no one wants.”

It shouldn’t take you more than one, at most two guesses to determine who makes up that “relatively small and isolated group” poetry now feeds: other poets. “Over the past half century,” Gioia writes, “as American poetry’s specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined.” It cannot come close to matching the audience for literary fiction, and it is rarely if ever reviewed in daily newspapers. “The New York Times,” Gioia observes, “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 to other poets.”

Gioia blames poetry’s retreat on a number of figures: poets, who at public readings celebrate and sing themselves (that is, read only their own work) rather than the genre of poetry as a whole; anthologists, whose editorial principles seem driven less by poetic quality than by collegial clubbiness; reviewers of poetry, who are almost always “overwhelmingly positive” and therefore neglect their role as evaluators and guides; academics, who base their decisions about employment on quantity of publications and not necessarily on quality, which floods the market with bad or only hastily-assembled poems; and finally poets themselves, who have isolated themselves from the public by taking up residency on campuses. This last, of course, is in contrast to poets from the first half of the twentieth century, who were either professionals (Wallace Stevens the insurance executive, William Carlos Williams the doctor), literary journalists (either editors or reviewers), or unemployed ne’er do wells hanging on in bohemian genteel poverty. The result, Gioia argues, was an audience made up of “artists and intellectuals, including scientists, clergymen, educators, lawyers, and, of course, writers,” a “group of nonspecialists who took poetry as seriously as fiction and drama”—exactly the audience poetry is so grossly missing today.

At the conclusion of his essay, Gioia offers a number of proposals for restoring poetry’s nonspecialist audience. They are, for the most part, unobjectionable. I especially like three: “When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people’s work”; “Poetry teachers, especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more time on performance”; and, finally, “Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively.” Number three—poets writing prose about poetry—has come to pass to some degree as David Orr is writing honest, incisive, and even occasionally humorous poetry reviews for The New York Times and other journals. Not surprisingly, Gioia would point out, Orr is a lawyer, not an academic.

But as much as there is to applaud in Gioia’s diagnosis of poetry’s ills and his prescriptions for them, the doctor also has some rather strange things to say about the patient. We’ll take these up in Part II.