Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture

Rating:
Summary: opening essays of book are essential reading for our age
Review: The Kirkus review of "Can Poetry Matter?" is pretty much right on target. The opening essays of the book are a necessary (and necessarily condemnatory) critique on the current state of poetry in America. The articles on Kees, Jeffers, etc., are less impressive, and the review reprints which end the book are even less so. Still, the strength of the first few essays outweighs these drawbacks.

Rating:
Summary: opening essays of book are essential reading for our age
Review: The Kirkus review of "Can Poetry Matter?" is pretty much right on target. The opening essays of the book are a necessary (and necessarily condemnatory) critique on the current state of poetry in America. The articles on Kees, Jeffers, etc., are less impressive, and the review reprints which end the book are even less so. Still, the strength of the first few essays outweighs these drawbacks.

Rating:
Summary: An insightful book
Review: The title essay in this book is by far the most important. It's well worth at least checking this book out from a library just to read that first essay. As a poet in an MFA program, I am currently experiencing the severance from the rest of society and alienation from literary criticism that Gioia describes so well. He's right on target. I'm not sure about some of his prescriptions for moving poetry back into public interest (i.e. reading from the work of other poets at one of your own readings), but the fact that he is able to articulate poetry's problems so well should at least get writers thinking about our own solutions. Incidentally, the rest of the essays do decline in quality through the course of the book, but I nevertheless found the final essay on New Formalism worthwhile. I actually didn't know much about the movement other than some mildly disparaging remarks made by various professors during workshop, so Gioia's perspective was refreshing.

Rating:
Summary: An insightful book
Review: The title essay in this book is by far the most important. It's well worth at least checking this book out from a library just to read that first essay. As a poet in an MFA program, I am currently experiencing the severance from the rest of society and alienation from literary criticism that Gioia describes so well. He's right on target. I'm not sure about some of his prescriptions for moving poetry back into public interest (i.e. reading from the work of other poets at one of your own readings), but the fact that he is able to articulate poetry's problems so well should at least get writers thinking about our own solutions. Incidentally, the rest of the essays do decline in quality through the course of the book, but I nevertheless found the final essay on New Formalism worthwhile. I actually didn't know much about the movement other than some mildly disparaging remarks made by various professors during workshop, so Gioia's perspective was refreshing.

Rating:
Summary: Poetry Makes Nothing Happen
Review: The title essay repeats arguments made by Joseph Epstein, John Aldridge, and many others over the years that literary culture has retreated to the university and lost its public appeal. Poetry has degenerated into a subculture and, at its worst, a counterculture. Gioia (Joy-a) closes his arguments with six sober proposals for revitalizing poetry, all of which merit consideration.

Given that Gioia was vice president of General Mills for fifteen years, it is unsurprising that he would be drawn to poets who, like himself, and unlike the bulk of poets today, made their own way in the world. By earning a living in the commercial world rather than through subsidized poetry programs or the kindness of strangers, he has much in common with William Carlos Williams (pediatrician), T. S. Eliot (banker), Wallace Stevens (corporate lawyer), and Ted Kooser (insurance). "Business and Poetry" is the most interesting essay here, except that it contains one of Gioia's few false notes. In describing suicide and alcoholism as fairly typical to American poets, he implies that poetry itself leads to self-destruction, which is not so much analysis as it is melodrama.

Yet the subject is fascinating, and I have often wondered how Eliot and Stevens balanced the aggression of the business world with an art that by definition makes nothing happen. Gioia shores up appreciation for other poets who for various reasons have been out of fashion: the forgotten Robinson Jeffers, the neglected Weldon Kees, sci-fi novelist Tom Disch, and the unknown Hoosier poet Jared Carter.

In the quest to revitalize poetry, Gioia is sympathetic to the New Formalist school, whose methods have included a return to high critical standards and the intellectual rigors of rhyme, meter, and narrative. This comes after decades of dominance by free verse, much of which has been undisciplined and sentimental. The worst of Robert Bly, for example, Gioia takes to task for asking the reader "to experience more emotion than the poet generates."

This leads to my last point that Gioia's criticism, aside from being charitable and measured, teaches something about criticism and about how to read and judge poetry. It does so, moreover, in a plain, accessible style that fulfills one of his goals for poetry: that it reach a broader audience and win back the intelligent, reading public.