Essay About Poetry Matter And New Books Of Poetry

Communication
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As originally published in
The Atlantic Monthly
May 1991
Can Poetry Matter?
Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America.
If poets venture outside their confined world, they can
to make it essential once more
by Dana Gioia
AMERICAN POETRY now belongs to a subculture. No
longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual
life, it has become the specialized occupation of a
relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic
activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group.
As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests
in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain
residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost
invisible.
What makes the situation of contemporary poets
particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of
unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never
before been so many new books of poetry published, so
many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been
so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several
thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing,
and many more at the primary and secondary levels.
Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate,
as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex
network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal,
state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in
the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized
retreats. There has also never before been so much
published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills
dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.
Return to The
Matter of Poetry: An
introduction to The
Atlantics Poetry Pages
See “Hearing From
Poetrys
Audience” (1992),
Dana Gioias follow up
to this article.
Return to Poetry
Pages
The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is
astounding by any historical measure. Just under a
thousand new collections of verse are published each year,
in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines
both small and large. No one knows how many poetry
readings take place each year, but surely the total must run
into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200
graduate creative-writing programs in the United States,
and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an
average of ten poetry students in each graduate section,
these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited
professional poets over the next decade. From such
statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in
the golden age of American poetry.
But the poetry boom has been a