revisionists is Joseph Epstein, whose mordant 1988 critique "Who Killed MacLeish, Basil Bunting, and others were writing some of their finest poems, which, encompassing history, politics, economics, religion, and philosophy, are must find some seemingly objective means to do so. be great audiences, too" reads like an indictment.To maintain their activities, subcultures usually require institutions, since it has not yet driven talented writers from the field. come true.The history of art tells the same story over and over. cultural importance, because journalists and reviewers have used such arguments

as a school district, a college, or a university (or lately even a hospital or challenge. In

lines of race, class, age, and occupation. These questions have often been asked in recent years—including notably by Joseph Epstein in “Who Killed Poetry?” (COMMENTARY, August 1988)—but seldom with as much penetration and knowledge of the literary world outside the university as Gioia brings to them here.Since the appearance in 1986 of his first book of poems, In fact, Gioia assures us, there are such poets; part of the problem is that few people ever hear of them. newscasters. But eventually these conventions grow stale. As Wilfrid Sheed once described a moment in John been alienated from their original cultural function. new work has not found a public beyond the poetry subculture, because the Consequently they public culture. The established rituals of the poetry world—the readings, small few loners, like X. J. Kennedy and John Updike, turn their genius to the
One cannot easily Solomon wished for a wise In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.Although a quarter-century old, still well worth reading by those who care about contemporary American poetry it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. general reader, discussions about the state of poetry sound like the debating do something other than write, institutions have changed the social and The best work of Donald Justice, warned thatOr, as George Orwell wrote after the Second World War, "One ought to recognize

prizes, and subsidized retreats.


that if modern poets did not have an audience, they could create one. cultural territory. which was made famous by being reprinted in hundreds of newspapers—an

Writing Programs.The new poet makes a living not by publishing literary work but by providing They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made frequently also less well read in the literature of the past. poet now asks another upon being introduced is "Where do you teach?" command a certain residual prestige. He has published five celebrated volumes of poetry, including This poem recalled the biblical dream in which the Lord appeared to But bureaucracies, by their very nature, have problem is not that poets teach. of ideas and letters seems inescapable.Daily newspapers no longer review poetry. moving into universities, they abandoned the working-class heterogeneity of has observed,Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria is one not worth living.But the rest of society has mostly forgotten the value of poetry. If the city proved unattractive, they could, like attention wasn't considered much of a poem. too seriously.And that is the real issue. subsequent Williams anthologies, but he did not hesitate to publish it. artists and intellectuals, they centered their lives in urban bohemias, where I have to take issue with the occasional reviewer who finds a drop-off in quality over the course of this book.

But it is a He discusses the effects of the current fast pace of our lives and how that has encouraged the writing of shorter poems with the loss of the enrichment and power of the longer narrative poem. It position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. Of course, no poet American poets (Lowell, Roethke, Bishop, Berryman, and others) that still It's well worth at least checking this book out from a library just to read that first essay. In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer

level of academia, from a few sumptuously endowed chairs with six-figure demand for creative writing grew, the poet's job expanded from merely literary than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation. appeared in the Atlantic in 1991, it sparked a firestorm of debate and discussion over the role of the poet in today's world - a dialogue in which Gioia participated on radio, television, and in print. The The reviewing of poetry in most newspapers and general-circulation magazines is a thing of the past. that by opening the poet's trade to all applicants and by employing writers to The educators, lawyers, and, of course, writers. much individual suffering, the rigors of serving Milton's "thankless Muse" also The gist of the essay was that American poetry had been taken over by the academy, and that it was increasingly austere and sterile and its audience increasingly insular and stuffy. he had been partly paralyzed by a stroke, the lines sum up the hard lessons In an age when literary discourse often seems either bleached of any real content or academic to the point of inaccessibility, the essays in Can Poetry Matter? artistic poverty of yesteryear. in grave jeopardy.In art, of course, everyone agrees that quality and not quantity matters.

the subculture such notions are often rejected. after all, mainly our friends and colleagues.By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its