EVENT 2/17/10: The Art of Resistance!

Cincinnati's one and only National Underground Railroad Freedom Center has all kinds of awesome events to help us celebrate Black History Month, but the event I am most looking forward to is the ART OF RESISTANCE forum!! Not just because my Facebook Friend Charles is putting it on...promise:-)

Description and event details below. Be there or be square!

WHAT?
Community Forum: The Art of Resistance: An Artistic Response

WHEN?

February 17, 2010 06:30 PM

WHERE?

National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
50 East Freedom Way
Cincinnati, Ohio

WHY?

In his seminal essay “On Black Art”, Dr. Maulana Karenga writes that “Black Art must be for the people, by the people and from the people. That is to say, it must be functional, collective and committing…. All art must be revolutionary and in being revolutionary it must be collective, committing, and functional.” In this presentation the Freedom Center will invite local artists to engage and artistically respond to our Without Sanctuary Thematic Framework of Looking Back, Bearing Witness and Keeping Watch.

Can Poetry Matter? YES.IT.CAN

Poetry, like all things, must evolve and adapt in order to remain relevant and to guarantee its on-going survival. Yesterday, Dana Gioia told us why. Today, she tells us how.

Enjoy!


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

All it would require is that poets and poetry teachers take more responsibility for bringing their art to the public. I will close with six modest proposals for how this dream might come true.

1. When poets give public readings, they should spend part of every program reciting other people's work—preferably poems they admire by writers they do not know personally. Readings should be celebrations of poetry in general, not merely of the featured author's work.

2. When arts administrators plan public readings, they should avoid the standard subculture format of poetry only. Mix poetry with the other arts, especially music. Plan evenings honoring dead or foreign writers. Combine short critical lectures with poetry performances. Such combinations would attract an audience from beyond the poetry world without compromising quality.

3. Poets need to write prose about poetry more often, more candidly, and more effectively. Poets must recapture the attention of the broader intellectual community by writing for nonspecialist publications.

They must also avoid the jargon of contemporary academic criticism and write in a public idiom. Finally, poets must regain the reader's trust by candidly admitting what they don't like as well as promoting what they like. Professional courtesy has no place in literary journalism.

4. Poets who compile anthologies—or even reading lists—should be scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire. Anthologies are poetry's gateway to the general culture. They should not be used as pork barrels for the creative-writing trade. An art expands its audience by presenting masterpieces, not mediocrity. Anthologies should be compiled to move, delight, and instruct readers, not to flatter the writing teachers who assign books. Poet-anthologists must never trade the Muse's property for professional favors.

5. Poetry teachers especially at the high school and undergraduate levels, should spend less time on analysis and more on performance. Poetry needs to be liberated from literary criticism. Poems should be memorized, recited, and performed. The sheer joy of the art must be emphasized. The pleasure of performance is what first attracts children to poetry, the sensual excitement of speaking and hearing the words of the poem. Performance was also the teaching technique that kept poetry vital for centuries. Maybe it also holds the key to poetry's future.

It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the ancient, spangle-feathered, unkillable phoenix rise from the ashes.

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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