Being a UK citizen and having only come back to contemporary poetry in the last few years, I have to confess that,
mea culpa, I knew nothing about Dana Gioia, the work of the NEA, and more importantly Gioia's 1991 article
Can Poetry Matter? (when the internet was hardly yet a public phenomenon). I read it last night and note that the article referred to in the recent thread on Gioia's time at NEA describes it as 'influential'.
Was it? What struck me is that, to my mind, nothing has changed. Gioia's conclusions show very few signs of implementation, at least in the UK. Poetry readings remain exclusively focussed on the poets presenting them and the arts of poetry, criticism, music, sculpture and painting etc remain resolutely discrete in presentation. Poetry has hardly escaped from the creative writing halls of academia and I very much doubt that the proliferation of poetry on the internet has actually brought it a wider audience amongst (for want of a better term) the general public. For example, Open Poetry Ltd's small presence on social networking sites, which I instigated as a means of spreading word about the 2007 international sonnet competition, engendered no discussion, just frequent requests from (mostly young) Facebook and Bebo users to 'check out my poetry' – self-focussed again.
There have been a few notable exceptions,
Poems on the Underground (subway) for instance, but as I read Gioia's article I kept thinking that it could have been written yesterday, not 17 years ago. Am I mistaken?
[I have posted this as a new thread since the thread on Gioia became a discussion of the work of the NEA, rather than of the manifesto his
Can Poetry Matter? article presented.]
Threaded Mode
