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| Subtitle | Essays on Poetry and American Culture |
| First Written | 1992 |
| Genre | Essays |
| Origin | US |
| Publisher | Graywolf Press |
| ISBN-10 | 9781555973704 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1555973704 |
| My Copy | library hardback |
| First Read | March 23, 2011 |
Can Poetry Matter?
In the first few essays, Gioia argues for the de-specialization of poetry; that it needs to somehow be wrested back from the insular world of academia and into the public domain - where poems are not thesis statements, but solely an enjoyable thing to read. As a non-academician myself, I'm with him.
Noted on March 23, 2011
This is a really thought-provoking series of essays about poetry - some of them about the state of American poetry circa 1990, and others about individual modern American poets, most of whom I've never read.
Gioia writes from a poet's perspective, but for a general audience. The essays have a bold clarity to them that seem somehow rare; he's not trying to impress, only communicate his ideas as honestly as possible. He's also very quotable.
Noted on March 23, 2011
But why should anyone but a poet care about the problems of american poetry? What possible relevance does this archaic art form have to contemporary society? In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own existence. As Wallace Stevens once observed, "The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man's happiness." Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favorite nursery rhymes again and again.
Quoted on March 23, 2011
American literature needs a more modest aesthetic of the long poem, a less chauvinistic theory that does not vainly seek the great at the expense of the good and genuine. It needs to free poets from the burden of writing the definitive long poem and allow them to work in more manageable, albeit limited, genres like satire, comedy, unheroic autobiography, discursive writing, pure narrative - be it fictional or historic - and even perhaps such unlikely narrative subgenres as science fiction, detective, or adventure stories - wherever, in short, their imagination takes them.
Quoted on March 23, 2011
With the best of intentions the university has intellectualized the arts to a point where they have been cut off from the vulgar vitality of popular traditions and, as a result, their public has shrunk to groups of academic specialist and a captive audience of students...
Quoted on March 23, 2011
The proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past thirty years has been a response less to an increased appetite for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation. Like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of the producers and no the consumers. And in the process the integrity of the art has been betrayed. Of course, no poet is allowed to admit this in public. The cultural credibility of the professional poetry establishment depends on maintaining a polite hypocrisy. Millions of dollars in public and private funding are at stake.
Quoted on March 23, 2011
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.
Quoted on March 23, 2011
I kept before me the idea of the general reader on whom both Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf felt the vitality of literature depended - the intelligent, engaged non-specialist.
Quoted on March 23, 2011