Dana Gioia
American poet and critic.
What does an instinctively popular poet do in contemporary America, where serious poetry is no longer a popular art? The public whose values and sensibility he celebrates is unaware of his existence. Indeed, even if they were aware of his poetry, they would feel no need to approach it. Cut off from his proper audience, this poet feels little sympathy with the specialized minority readership that now sustains poetry either as a highly sophisticated verbal game or secular religion. His sensibility shows little similarity to theirs except for the common interest in poetry. And so the popular poet usually leads a marginal existence in literary life. His fellow poets look on him as an anomaly or an anachronism. Reviewers find him eminently unnewsworthy. Publishers see little prestige attached to printing his work. Critics, who have been trained to celebrate complexity, consider him an amiable simpleton.
Money. You don't know where it's been,
but you put it where your mouth is.
And it talks.
Poetry is not a creed or dogma. It is a special way of speaking and listening.
What is the defining difference between passive and active citizens? Curiously, it isn't income, geography, or even education. It depends on whether or not they read for pleasure and participate in the arts. These cultural activities seem to awaken a heightened sense of individual awareness and social responsibility.
Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around — not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.
Audiences and critics acknowledge that a play or concerto gains force in great rendition. A good play may overcome bad staging. A great concerto may survive a poor soloist. But it is naturally assumed that a more accomplished performance intensifies the impact of the work. The play's text or concerto's score does not change, but the right actors and musicians help realize its full potential. Among contemporary literary critics, however, one never encounters this notion in regard to books and printing. To recognize the sensual contributions of the physical elements of a book is somehow assumed to demean the spiritual purity of the text. To notice the book itself smacks of philistinism, and to make distinctions based on paper, binding, and typography brings accusations of elitism or decadence.
Tradition is not, as post-modernists maintain, a library or museum the artist plunders. It is the endless conversation between the living and the dead. Young artists enter into this conversation passionately — not merely intellectually, though study and analysis play a part. They live and breathe it. Tradition is not a public building. It is a love affair.
In America, the term younger poet is applied with chivalric liberality. It can be used to describe anyone not yet collecting a Social Security pension.