Communication

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

work

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.

Page 1 of Can Poetry Matter? - 91.05 23

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/gioia/gioia.htm 11/10/2003

Return to The

Matter of Poetry: An

introduction to The

Atlantic's Poetry Pages

See "Hearing From

Poetry's

Audience" (1992),

Dana Gioia's 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 distressingly confined

phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have

created a large professional class for the production and

reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers,

graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators.

Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually

become the primary audience for contemporary verse.

Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was

once directed outward, is now increasingly focused

inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed

within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby's

definition of contemporary academic renown from The

Last Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone

famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to

make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago,

"only poets read poetry" was meant as damning criticism.

Now it is a proven marketing strategy.

The situation has become a paradox, a Zen riddle of

cultural sociology. Over the past half century, as American

poetry's specialist audience has steadily expanded, its

general readership has declined. Moreover, the engines

that have driven poetry's institutional success--the

explosion