Poetry

Poetry Matter?” was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1991, it touched off a salutary national debate; and it remains provocative. Gioia is devoted to the possibility of high culture without sterile hermeticism, and is uncompromising in his depiction of how far short of this standard poetry has in fact fallen: “Today poetry is a modestly upwardly mobile, middle-class profession— not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia. . . . However healthy poetry may appear within its professional subculture, it has lost this larger audience [of intellectually curious readers], who represent poetry’s bridge to the general culture.”

He is unsparing of individual poets—for example, calling Robert Bly “simplistic, monotonous, insensitive to sound, enslaved by literary diction, and pompously sentimental,” and saying of James Dickey that “it takes a certain genius to write this badly.” But he also writes: “Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let’s build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.” That’s the kind of fresh sensibility the NEA desperately needs; for other examples, please consult Gioia’s book, passim.

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Poetry Matter?” was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1991, it touched off a salutary national debate; and it remains provocative. Gioia is devoted to the possibility of high culture without sterile hermeticism, and is uncompromising in his depiction of how far short of this standard poetry has in fact fallen: “Today poetry is a modestly upwardly mobile, middle-class profession— not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia. . . . However healthy poetry may appear within its professional subculture, it has lost this larger audience [of intellectually curious readers], who represent poetry’s bridge to the general culture.”

He is unsparing of individual poets—for example, calling Robert Bly “simplistic, monotonous, insensitive to sound, enslaved by literary diction, and pompously sentimental,” and saying of James Dickey that “it takes a certain genius to write this badly.” But he also writes: “Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let’s build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.” That’s the kind of fresh sensibility the NEA desperately needs; for other examples, please consult Gioia’s book, passim.