Like priests in a town of agnostics...

I can’t imagine a world without poetry. I am that girl who likes to read poems aloud, to myself, and is often moved to tears by prose…Go figure…I started a poetry blog:-) Not surprising, though, I am not the majority. In fact, I belong to a marginal group of Americans that is shrinking by the day. While poets are still regarded with an almost papal degree of respect, poetry as a literary art, has become more fodder for literary journals and academic analysis than an active art is truly relevant to most Americans.

15 years ago, Dana Gioia laid out the challenges of this poetry subculture in the powerful title essay of her 1992 book Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture. Since then, the slam movement has gotten so big that even cities like Cincinnati host a number of poetry nights. National and global poetry competitions have cropped up. HBO's Def Poetry Jam has become a hit. And (thanks to YouTube) you can access poetry performance from all over the world.

But, how much has really changed? How much farther does the poetry movement need to go to push beyond the fringes and into mainstream culture? Is that even the right goal?

Although a bit outdated, Gioia's essay is extremely thought-provoking and left me with many questions about the future of the art I love so much. Fantastic read!

Enjoy:)

Can Poetry Matter?
Excerpt from Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture.

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.

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.
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