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Responding
to Dana Gioia's, "Can Poetry Matter?"
by
Jake
Berry
(An
earlier version of this essay first appeared at the now defunct website, Muse
Apprentice Guild)
Since
its publication over a decade ago Gioia’s essay has inspired many responses,
pro and con. I can certainly understand this. Part of the intention of the
article it seems to me is to provoke a response. Gioia is not only an excellent
writer, but writes with an unusual clarity in a time when aesthetic discussion
can often require some form of initiation into the vocabulary and context of a
particular approach. So much the better for Gioia, and for all of us who read
him. My
initial response to the question, before I read the essay—to think, "Can
Poetry Matter?" was "I hope not!" Why would I respond in this
way? I am a poet and should have much at risk. I should want to see poetry
matter as much as possible. The problem lies in what matters culturally and who
decides what matters. Despite the fact that more books are sold now than ever
before, that more books are purchased and presumably read, we seem somehow less
erudite, less intellectual than we were even thirty years ago. And the cultural
artifacts, the phenomena that matter, even to the intelligentsia often seem so
insignificant when compared to art, past or present, that in order to matter one
would have to sacrifice the very art one hoped to foster in the first place. So
is it better to be irrelevant than relevant in a vapid culture? Am I cynical? Of
course I am. What was once known as pop culture seems now almost universally
accepted as the only culture. It is easier to sell immediate gratuitous
sensation than work that requires sensitive, focused intelligence. The culture
has been consumed by an advertising culture that is by its very nature the art
of deception. How does one hope to promote the appearance of the truth (however
elusive and relative) when deception is the foundation upon which our
assumptions are based? When the lie is so full of immediate gratification? What
does it matter if the gratification is short lived? A new one will quickly
arrive. Even one of the greatest tragedies in American history is quickly
absorbed by corporations as a sales gimmick. Patriotism becomes something you
buy or sell, not something you do. And if you criticize the mania you are deemed
unpatriotic, un-American. So why be relevant in such a frenzy of narcissistic
extravagance?
But
I am an infidel, even to outsiders practicing an exiled art. Perhaps something
has eluded me. Perhaps I have missed something by not participating in the
academic subculture that Gioia speaks of in his essay, or by not seeking
publication in the journals generated and authorized by that subculture. What I
read in these journals is writing school product poetry. This does not mean that
I have not read poems that I thought were excellent. As with almost any
collection there are some wonderful poems among much mediocrity and a few
horrible exercises. The problem is that it seems that the majority of these
poems have been generated by the same mind, or at least the same mind-set. It
seems diversity is limited to a few shifts of tone and subject matter, but the
approach is almost always the same. An outsider gets the impression that this is
what poetry is at this moment according to the academy, which wields the
cultural stamp of approval. Does this poetry matter? To some people it matters
very much, to the subculture it is by, for, and made of, but to few others.
Gioia draws the same conclusion and shares a similar frustration. The vital
point he makes is this: By
opening the poets trade to all applicants and by employing writers to do
something other than writing, institutions have changed the social and economic
identity of the poet from artist to educator […] Poetry suffers when literary
standards are forced to conform to intellectual ones. So
this is, by and large, the condition which compels the question, "Can
Poetry Matter?" One of the problems with a poet teaching at a university,
especially teaching poetry, is that his or her hours are regular and filled with
at least the shadow of the kind of thing that should be required primarily for
new poems. The regularity of this same kind of mental activity day after day is
essential to teaching and learning large amounts of information, but regular
poetry instruction is most often as deadening to the art as the habit is to
daily life.
Gioia
seeks alternatives in the past, in how previous generations of poets managed to
survive when their principle occupation could not sustain them. This is a
valuable examination and it certainly bears consideration. And there are
examples even today of poets surviving, and working, beyond the academic
culture. Yet almost none of them are accepted as valid by that dominant culture.
Hank Lazer made a strong argument in this regard in the two volumes of his Opposing
Poetries. Those poetries being the academic, writing school poetry, which he
calls "plainverse", and the, at that time, up and coming avant-garde
which generally falls under the term 'language' poetry. Regarding this, it seems
the academy has found a solution to revolt by taking a lesson from the markets
of the 1970s. Rather than resist the burgeoning "revolution" against
complacency and materialism it simply devoured it in the name of style and
fashion and sold the trappings—the clothes, haircuts, and symbology—in a
slightly refined form to the culture at large. The result was the decadence of
the late 1970s and 1980s. Similarly, the academy has begun to absorb some of the
language poets, often over the strenuous objection of the writing school poets,
and has thereby transformed the avant-garde into a codified, institutionally
verified avant-garde that can be taught (marketed) to a growing, though less
popular, subculture. One can imagine a time (is that time already here?) when in
order to be accepted as an avant-garde poet a young writer would be required to
have a masters and possibly a doctorate in the avant-garde formula of the day.
In such a condition anything genuinely avant-garde would be utterly dismissed,
marginalized to the point of invisibility. Perhaps I am an infidel indeed
because such institutionalization seems to me preposterous and antithetical to
what poetry is in the first place. I dare say Gioia would agree.
So
what are we outsiders, so brazen as to assert ourselves as poets, to do? If
poetry is intellectually commodified by the universities how are we to resist
the temptation to seek a decent living inside that system when there are no
alternatives, or certainly fewer alternatives than in previous generations? The
poets I know survive in any number of ways. Some of them work in universities,
but not as poets. Some manage to work in other professions and still find time
and energy to be poets. As before the poet as educator phenomenon you find them
in virtually every profession, but they do not have the outlets for publication
that existed before. What has happened in poetry, as in much the rest of the
culture, is a great homogenization. One can practice the accepted forms or
resign oneself to obscurity, and many, most, of the poets outside the academy
have done exactly that. They pass poems to one another and publish in the
handful of publications that accept outsiders. Primarily they work and either
self-publish or publish one another in small inexpensive editions that the
general public would not even recognize as a book. Most of the poetry I read
that might "matter" has almost no exposure at all to an audience
beyond a few interconnected renegade cabals in what remains of the literary
underground.
Does
this matter? Should this raise public concern? Should poets be dismayed by this
state of affairs? Should these poets move to the mountains (however
metaphorically) like the Zen and Taoist hermits in China, write their poems on
"rock-and-bark" and vanish entirely? Does it matter what they do? Yes,
absolutely, and probably not. We cannot expect culture as we now have it, and
have had it for a while, to suddenly perform an about face and hunger en
masse for all kinds of poetry. Poetry
has not mattered and will not matter to them. Yet, the effects of poetry, or the
absence of it, will matter because the aesthetic that sustains poets and their
audience is part of the fabric of culture; once that strand is removed, or
marginalized, everything to which it is connected is effected. Still, there will
be a few who will manage as Gioia says, quoting Robert Frost, "to lodge a
few poems where they will be hard to get rid of." The culture's attitude
toward poetry is evidenced in Frost’s sarcasm, which seems less sarcastic
today.
As
he comes toward his conclusion Gioia says some things that I would like to
address in particular: To
regain poetry's readership one must begin by meeting Williams's challenge to
find what "concerns many men," not simply what concerns poets. Perhaps,
but this is a double dilemma. "The first," as Gioia says, involves
the role of language in a free society […] A society whose intellectual
leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of
language will become slaves to those who retain it. Certainly
true. But what if that skill is lost generally, at all levels? Even though
"politicians, preachers, copywriters, [and] newscaster" do manipulate
the public with a better command of the language, they too are victims of a
downward spiral. The language itself seems to be suffering a series of
diminishing returns with the exception of small groups of intellectuals and a
few similar areas. Intelligent conversation, let alone, an intelligent populace
seems increasingly remote. Again perhaps this is because I am removed from the
great centers of learning, but when college courses include studies of sitcoms,
and their "cultural value", we may be quickly arriving at a place
where our intellectuals are even less informed than the general public which may
have no taste for serious information at all. The culture has gone from one
obsessed with being entertained to one obsessed with advertisement, with the
next consumable item and/or experience. We are wealthy enough to have that
luxury, but when excess becomes the essential what is actually essential is
forgotten. As Gioia says: Poetry
is not the entire solution to keeping the nation's language clear and honest,
but one is hard pressed to imagine a country's citizen improving the health of
its language while abandoning poetry. When
"what concerns many men" has become in effect rootless it may fall not
to the high arts, but to "low" art to speak to the many. Perhaps the
poets have been usurped by folk based artists who speak more directly to the
experience of this rootlessness. Popular artists like Bruce Springsteen, Ani
Defranco, Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill are in fact much closer in language and
concern to the general population. Is what they write poetry? Many would say so,
I among them. Is it poetry in the same sense as William Carlos Williams? No. But
does that make it any less valid? Indeed, if relevance is the issue, the popular
artists are by far more valid to the general public than any poet living or
dead. Must we draw a line and broadly divide the two poetries, one for the
masses, one for the intelligentsia? What happens when the intelligentsia is so
enthralled by the poetry of the masses that they begin to disregard the more
challenging forms that they alone can sustain? Does it matter what happens?
Gioia: The
most serious question for the future of the American culture is whether the arts
will continue to exist in isolation and decline into subsidized academic
specialties or whether some possibility of rapprochement with the educated
public remains. This
may indeed be the most serious question, but before we can answer it we may have
to redefine what "the educated public" is, and whether or not it is
formal poetry or popular song that will be valid to them. Should we as poets be
prepared to accept, even embrace, obscurity in order to practice an art that is
important to the deeper, more complex, conditions of our species? For what
reason? Does reason have anything to do with it? Do we not practice this art out
of some obsession that forever seems to remain just beyond our ability to
describe and name? Or do we practice it to keep the poetic faculties alive
regardless of who or how many may subscribe to that experience? It is certain
that our culture contains a great many people that are broadly intelligent
enough to appreciate and generate poetry that is populist in its scope, and to
recognize and call it an art. Do they constitute an "educated public"?
Probably not, for the most part, in the sense that Gioia means it. Does
that kind of public still exist? Yes, but most likely in a diminished
percentage. At
the end of his essay Gioia lists six proposals for promoting poetry. All of them
are excellent suggestions, but there are three that I think would have the most
lasting impact. The first is, When
poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting
other people's work. Yes,
and among the suggestions for which other poetry to read I would add poets that
are well known among poets, or perhaps poets of a particular style, but not
broadly known. Another of Gioia's proposals is, When
arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard
subculture of poetry only. Or
include the other arts as part of the performance of the poetry. Which leads to
the other proposal I want to mention: Poetry
teachers, especially at high schools and under-graduate levels, should spend
less time on analysis and more on performance. As
he continues, "The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized." Poetry,
after all, begins in the epic poem, or at least this is where we first read it,
and it is the written document of poetry that was performed, usually with music.
Poetry is certainly many times a very private art, but once the poem has
appeared the poem should, if possible, be made public, and not just in the sense
that it is published in a book. It should be given the sound that was in the ear
of the poet as he or she wrote it. People should be able to hear the voice, and
even see the physical form, of the poet connected to the poem. The voice and
body of the poet is one form of the poem's physicality, and whether in live
performance or recordings, the poet's physical aspects in body and sound extend
the poem into the public arena. All
these suggestions should work to make poetry matter. Will they make poetry
matter the way a dollar matters, the way a pop song matters because it sticks in
the brain, the way the allure of advertising to the consuming instinct matters?
No, but why should poetry want to matter in that way? And ultimately, if poetry
falls into complete obscurity, it will either be rediscovered in the future, or
reborn under another name out of human necessity, or forgotten altogether if the
species develops along a course that has no use for it. Either way, poetry is
with us, and it is a poet's work to do as long as there are poets to do it. Ultimately, I agree with Gioia about the condition in which we find poetry (and there has been little significant change since the essay was written). He is to be commended for seeking out and providing a series of solutions when it would have been easier perhaps to articulate an eloquent complaint. Still, I do not share his optimism, though I wish I could. This may be the result, again, of my distance from the heart of the matter, but I cannot help but feel that if poetry matters in the future it may do so in strange and unexpected ways.
copyright © Jake Berry
Jake
Berry is
a poet, musician and visual artist. The author of Brambu Drezi,
Species of Abandoned Light, Drafts of the Sorcery, and numerous other
books. He has been an active member of the global arts and literary community
for more than 25 years. His poems, fiction, essays, reviews and other writings
have been published widely in both print and electronic mediums. In 2010,
Lavender Ink released a collaborative book, Cyclones In High Northern
Latitudes, with poet Jeffrey Side and drawings by Rich Curtis; and Outside
Voices: An Email Correspondence (with Jeffrey Side) was released by
Otoliths also in that year.
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