I love how Dana envisions the “common reader” — not the “incurious mass audience of the popular media” but rather “the idea of the general reader envisioned by Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf felt the vitality of literature depended — the intelligent, engaged non-specialist.”

The first essay is the titular piece. It begins “American poetry now belongs to a subculture.” That’s very true and it makes me sad.

“Only poets read poetry” — Dana writes — isn’t “meant as damning criticism” but as a “proven marketing strategy.”

The current state of poetry — a golden age within the academic world and poet subculture but relatively ignored by the rest of American culture — is “a Zen Riddle of cultural sociology.” I absolutely love that phrase.

Verse was once a major driving force in culture, but as it “retreated into lyric” prose took over a lot of the cultural space it once occupied. As a sort of prose machine myself, I would be the first to recognize the importance of prose over verse in my own time, and it saddens me that we don’t get back to more verses in our entertainments. 

Dana argues, correctly, that while poetry used to compete within magazine spaces for attention, in isolation, that competition which forced poets to strive for excellence no longer exists. Much of poetry now consists of authors stroking their own egos, not building one another up to be better poets; this was my view in the university setting and Dana saw it, too.

Most criticism in the poetry space is also overwhelmingly positive – promotional not useful for true literary purposes. While I’m fine with people trying to find the best qualities in a work, no one gets better by being heaped upon with adulate praise non-stop!

I feel like, and Dana seems to be getting at this same point, that the current state of poetry is entirely purposeful on the part of the academic world. “By abandoning the hard work of evaluation, the poetry subculture demeans its own art,” Dana writes. As Robert Bly discusses, “… the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.” There you have it. Poetry is a way to say — “hey I’m better educated than you and you know nothing!” It’s really disgusting and a travesty for the art form!

So, this book is from 1992, and the essays from sometime before that, probably the late 80’s from what’s being mentioned. Things have definitely fallen apart quite a bit more since then…

…

Dana Gioia’s six modest proposals for saving poetry in American culture:

1. “When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people’s work” – I entirely agree with this, otherwise you become much too egocentric
2. “When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only.” – We all know mixed media is better. Apparently, Dana knew this already in 1992
3. “Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively.” – I tried to do this. My efforts became my introduction to my collection. Those remarks now exist in print before, for better or worse.
4. “Poets who compile anthologies – or even reading lists – should be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire.” – I failed a poetry course in New Hampshire because fuck anthologies. But he’s right.
5. “Poetry teachers, especially at the high-school and under-graduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance.” (I’ve been thinking about this for years and have actually mentioned this exact problem on multiple occasions.)
6. “Finally, poets and arts administrators should use radio to expand the art’s audience.” (We have Soundcloud. So, that kind of worked out. I completely agree with him, though. But radio has become way too corporate for that, even college stations.)

…

Other quotes from this book by Dana Gioia:

Dana Gioia and His Conclusion on What We Can Learn From Businessman Poets: “Their lives may not always provide other poets with overtly inspiring examples, but their careers offer pragmatic and important lessons in spiritual survival. In a secret that destroys or distracts most artists, they found a paradoxical means to prosper…”

Dana Gioia on a Lack of Business-Related Poetry: “If business is nonexistent as a poetic subject, there is also a surprising paucity of serious verse on political and social themes.” 

Dana Gioia on American Poetry: “American poetry has defined business, mainly by excluding it business does not exist in the world of poetry, and therefore by implication has become everything that poetry is not — a world without imagination, enlightenment, or perception. It is the universe from which poetry is trying to escape.”

Dana Gioia on American Poetry: “Although American poetry sets out to talk about the world, it usually ends up talking about itself.”

Dana Gioia on Business: “Business, then, is an abstract collective noun as difficult to deal with tangible as liberty, the people, or any other political buzzword.”

Dana Gioia on Business and Poetry: “One law of investment remains constant between business and poetry — the higher the risk, the higher the potential reward.”

Dana Gioia on Common Sense: “Common sense instinctively demands a more direct relationship between life and art.”

Dana Gioia on Criticism: “Criticism should make meaningful distinctions, not apply irrelevant standards.” (You know, precisely what today’s academic world refuses to do.)

Dana Gioia on Essential for Young Writers’ Development: “Time to think, time to read, time for idle but intelligent conversation — all of these are essential for most young writers’ development, and it is foolish to think that without them a poet’s performance wouldn’t suffer in some way.”  (This is just good advice for young artists and intellectuals, in general.)

Dana Gioia on Good Poetry: “Good poetry never underestimates its readers. It actively seeks their imaginative and intellectual collaboration by assuming and exploiting a common frame I’d reference.” (Can the same be done for prose?)

Dana Gioia on How Talking is Easier Than Writing: “Talking is easier than writing and much more immediately gratifying. More than one poet has poured his genius into conversation at the expense of his poetry.” (Granted, reliable speech-to-text software didn’t really exist yet when this book was published in the 90’s, so this can be partly remedied these days. I’ve wasted so many breaths that should’ve been captured for more productive purposes using such apps.)

Dana Gioia on Ideas in John Ashbery Poems : “One never remembers ideas from an Ashbery poem, one recalls the tones and textures. If ideas are dealt with at all, they are present only as faint echoes heard remotely in some turn of phrase. Ideas in Ashbery are like the melodies in some jazz improvisation where the musicians have left out the original tune to avoid paying royalties. They are wild variations on a missing theme with only the original chord changes as a clue. This sort of music can be fun as long as someone doesn’t try to analyze it like a Beethoven symphony.”

Dana Gioia on Jared Carter’s Writing About “Neutral Objects”: “Even when he is writing about supposedly neutral objects, Carter imbues them with personal importance, usually the human necessity to believe that something one does will resist Time.”

Dana Gioia on John Ashbery: “… his work must not be read so much as overheard — like an attractive voice talking at another tale.”

Dana Gioia on Literature: “Literature not only changes; it must change to keep its force and vitality.”

Dana Gioia on Money and Poets: “Money has been a subject that has often interested American poets, possibly because they usually have had so little of it. For many poets, it must possess the irresistible lure of the unattainable.”

Dana Gioia on Money and Poets (Also): “And who can deny its intrinsic appeal to a poet, for is not money literally the one true metaphor, the one commodity that can be translated into all else?”

Dana Gioia on Poems Not Existing in Isolation: “Poems do not exist in isolation but share and exploit the history and literature of the language in which they are written.”

Dana Gioia on a difference between Poetry and Prose: “One may write poems for God alone, but critical prose is composed for editors.” (From the acknowledgments)

Dana Gioia on Poetry: “Poetry is an art… whose pleasures are generally open to any intelligent person with the inclination to savor them.” (From the preface)

Dana Gioia on Poetry Criticism: “As poetry criticism abandoned a public voice, the literary public began, not surprisingly, to abandon poetry.”

Dana Gioia on Readers: “Readers are not angels, and they wonder about the human figures who create the books they read.”

Dana Gioia on Robert Bly: “To become well known, one has to court a broader public — and not by poetry but personality. Bly knew that the mass media would always have room for a few poets, provided they were sufficiently colorful.”

Dana Gioia on Robert Bly’s Detractors: “His detractors see him as an industrious opportunist, a writer of immense but overwhelmingly pernicious influence and shallow achievement.” (Isn’t this the case for any popular writer, though?)

Dana Gioia on Students and the American Reader “…students, of course, do not fully represent the American reader, but they do serve, to borrow a phrase from economists, as a reliable leading indicator of general cultural trends.”

Dana Gioia on Successful Artists: “What does it mean in America to be a successful artist? Essentially, these are working-class people — a lot of them have second jobs. They’re highly trained — dancers, singers, actors — and they don’t make a lot of money. They make tremendous sacrifices for their work. They’re people who should have our respect, the same as a farmer. We don’t want a society without them.”

Dana Gioia on T.S. Eliot : “…like the prudent banker he became, Eliot gradually learned the necessity of repressing the open, emotional side of his nature in favor of the rational and deliberate.”

Dana Gioia on the Decline of Poetry’s Popular Audience:  “…a major reason for the decline in poetry’s popular audience stems directly from the abandonment of this aural education for the joylessly intellectual approach of critical analysis.”

Dana Gioia on the Hyper-Intellectualization of the Arts: “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 specialists and a captive audience of students, both of which refer to everything beyond the university as ‘the real world.’”  (Intellectualism is good, but overdoing it, like too much of anything, is a bad thing.)

Dana Gioia on the Luxuries of a Poet in Business: “They did not have to review uninteresting books, write matter-of-fact lectures, teach unwanted class, or quickly sell every poem and essay. They could afford to choose what to write and where to publish.”

Dana Gioia on the Necessity of Aesthetic Pleasure: “Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification, because a life without such pleasure is one not worth living.”

Dana Gioia on the Necessity of Serious Literary Criticism: “If literature is to continue as an important force in American culture, to reinvent a public idiom capable of serious criticism is a necessary enterprise.”

Dana Gioia on the Paradox of Simple Poetry: “Paradoxically, the simpler poetry is, the more difficult it becomes for a critic to discuss intelligently. Trained to explicate, the critic often loses the ability to evaluate literature outside the critical act.” (Everyone is trained to find problems with things that don’t exist.)

Dana Gioia on the Poetry Industry: “Like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of the producers and not the consumers.” (Consider Dana wrote this in 1992. This epidemic has extended to all sorts of content.)

Dana Gioia on the Poetry of Ted Kooser: “[Kooser] has not sought refuge in grandiose imaginative schemes but has remained committed to realizing each poem fully in itself, for instinctively he knows that it is not the size of the poet’s intentions that ensures survival but the quality of his individual poems.”

Dana Gioia on the Preconceptions Americans Have of Poets: “…the poet is an impractical, dreamy sort of fellow incapable of holding down a real job. Too bored with business to pay attention to the most basic details of a job, a poet can be nothing but a poet.” (I don’t actually believe this to be true.)

Dana Gioia on the Quality of Works: “A work is good only in proportion to the richness and complexity of interpretations it provokes.” (Well, people misinterpret my writing in so many different ways all the time, so it must be great!)

Dana Gioia on the Societal Importance of Poetry: “Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it — be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters.”

Dana Gioia on the State of American Poetry: “American poetry may be bold and expansive in its moods and subject matter, but it remains timorous and short-winded in its range.”

Dana Gioia On Wallace Stevens: “…strangely, the same sensibility that created a brilliantly idiosyncratic and unmistakably induced style was also drawn exclusively to abstract and universal themes.” (Sounds a lot like me.)

Dana Gioia Referring to the Midwest of Jared Carter’s Poems: “Today the landscape cries out for a poet to explain what has happened, to reconcile the empty storefronts, abandoned farmhouses, and miles of lonely highways to those who have stayed on.”

Dana Gioia Regarding the Poetry of Weldon Kees: “In mythic worlds there are patterns of action that demand completion, and a fallen world must have its redeemer…”

Dana Gioia Regarding the Poetry of Weldon Kees, also: “Man leads a meaningless life in an indifferent, natural world, but longing for some higher purpose he pointlessly sacrifices himself or others to bring about a newer, better order.”

Dana Gioia with Advice for Young Writers “Young writers not only need to learn their craft well. They must also shape their values and aspirations to resist the manifold temptations to write cheaply or dishonestly in the fashionable ways. They need to develop a character strong enough to withstand both failure and success.” (It took me well into my thirties to learn these lessons…)