Dana Gioia is a poet,
essayist, former chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts – and a former vice president of marketing for
General Foods (now part of Kraft). In 1991,
while he was still helping sell Jell-O (a brand is largely credited with
reviving), he wrote an article for The
Atlantic entitled “Can Poetry
Matter,”
which caused something of an uproar in the poetry world.
Gioia
argued that poetry had been captured by academia, and had become disconnected
from its reading public. Poetry was in danger of becoming irrelevant to anyone
except poets who were increasingly the people who taught poetry.
Yes,
he was a published poet, but he was also a business executive. Worse, he was a
business executive who could write a well-argued essay about literary culture.
And his analysis was largely correct, which might explain some of the outrage
that followed.
To continue reading, please see my post
today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
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