February 12, 2007

• I just finished reading a collection of essays on poetry by Dana Gioia called Can Poetry Matter? The collection takes its title from the name of the first essay, which tries to answer that very question.  It goes through and chronicles how poetry has become more and more isolated, not just from popular culture and mass audiences, but even from the "literary class" that takes an interest in classical music, serious literature, jazz, art, etc.  The only people that are reading new poetry these days, says Gioia, are poets in academia, and so this incestuous cycle does no one any favors.  The problem is made worse by the fact that mainstream critics aren't reviewing much of the new poetry being published, and when general interest publications (e.g. the N.Y. Times Book Review) do publish poetry reviews, they spend scant time on any one new book, instead making passing reference to three or four options.  Without critics to identify the best poetry being written, those who might be interested in learning more about poetry have no idea where to begin -- where to find something good -- so they give up.  Add to that the fact that academics are the ones publishing anthologies and tend to self-promote, and much good poetry falls through the cracks or is buried within a mountain of mediocrity. 

  Much of that assessment seems to right to me.  The point that resonates most with me is the idea that there's an "intellectual class" of people that represent a perspective audience for poetry, but that aren't finding it.  You're never going to have the average American reading poetry after dinner, but I think there is a subset of a few million people that might be game.  I feel like I'm one of those people, which is why I'm trying to learn more about poetry.  If not me, then who?  I also think a significant problem is that poetry simply isn't being taught to middle and high school kids.  Maybe my educational experience was uniquely bad, but I barely learned anything about poetry in school.  We read a few Walt Whitman poems in 11th grade and some Emily Dickinson.  And there was John Donne talking about sex... err fleas.  Kinky bastard.  There was the occasional Shakespeare; and I remember being subjected to We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks and hating it -- although I suppose I should have appreciated any exposure to anything we got.  (I was a lot more conservative then anyway, so a lot was lost on me.)  But I didn't read any Blake or Longfellow or Eliot or Auden or Byron, etc, etc. 

  I think the gap in my poetry education was much more harmful, because it's difficult to pick that stuff up by yourself in your 20s.  Let's face it -- I'm not going to be reading William Blake poems for fun.  Milton; Dante.  Nope.  It's sad, and maybe someday I'll change my mind, but I think it's more likely I'll be struck by a bus than read The Inferno.  Poetry is something you need to read out loud and discuss.  I didn't read many novels in school either, but it's a lot easier to pick up The Great Gatsby and analyze it than The Wasteland. 

  Of course, basic reading skills are still a struggle for a substantial percentage of high schoolers, so maybe I'm being unrealisitic.  But it sucks that public high schools aren't equipped with the capability to teach one advanced class per grade level where you really sit down and analyze poems.  Maybe in the end, this is harmless.  It might be lost on even the advanced kids that age anyway.  But I remember some random stuff from high school, things I never had repeated in any class since, so it would have been nice to have at least some fragments of poetry knowledge to fall back on now.

  The rest of Gioia essay collection covers a variety of interesting topics.  There are a number of pieces that deal with a single poet -- Robert Bly, Weldon Kees, Ted Kooser, Howard Moss and Robinson Jeffers. There are shorter pieces on T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop, and others.  At times the pieces lapse into generalities, and I wish the longer pieces contained more analysis from passages from the poets' work.  But they offer a flavor of each poet's work, and some mentions of other poems which might be a good starting place for future reading.  The shorter pieces (Eliot, Stevens, Bishop) are essentially biographical, which, not knowing much about their lives, I found informative.

  There are still other essays like "Notes on the New Formalism," which talks about a movement away from free-verse and bawdy un-metered, non-rhyming poems, to something more "traditional."  Essentially, these new poets are rebelling by reaching back to older forms.  There's an essay on "Business and Poetry" which examines why poets who worked in business didn't mention it in their poetry.  (Eliot = banker; Stevens = insurance lawyer, for example.)  That was one of the more promising topics, but I thought it was one of the weaker essays.  Over-written, redundant, not terribly insightful.  I guess the point is that non-businessman poets don't know anything about business, so don't write about it.  And businessman poets see poetry as a means of escape from daily life, and so don't use material from daily life. 

  I should interject here that there was something a little annoying about Gioia's writing style.  There were long parts the book that were fine, but every now and then the writing would bother me.  The sentences were too wordy, or sounded a bit too presumptuous.  Lately, I've tried to embrace the approach that we should write how we speak.  In that vein, I hate seeing the word "moreover" in print.  I have never heard a person utter "moreover" in conversation, but you see it peppered all over people's writing.  I used it a lot myself, but recently it seems unbearably fake to me.  Every time Gioia used the word, I couldn't help editing the sentence to remove the word and make it sound more natural.

  All and all, though, it was an interesting read.  Judge Posner (my hero) says that it's important for lawyers to read about non-legal topics and then bring that wide range of knowledge to bear in their legal analysis.  So in that vein, I've been trying to find essay collections to read that cover random topics.  I feel like I learned some very basic things about poetry in general, and a lot of specifics about a few poets in particular.  So it was a worthwhile read.

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