Poetry at Work: Dana Gioia on Poetry in Business

In Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry and American Culture, Dana Gioia included an article on business and poetry. His focus was on the odd fact that many poets who worked in business, some their entire working lives, wrote virtually nothing in their poetry about their business or anything related to it. This includes poets like T.S. Eliot (Bank of England), Wallace Stevens (Hartford Insurance) and Ted Kooser (Liberty Financial Insurance). (Farmers, like Robert Frost and Wendell Berry, are a different matter.)

The conventional wisdom, Gioia says, and especially the conventional American wisdom, is that poets “must be people out of the ordinary; they must be strong, even eccentric individuals.” In other words, Walt Whitman fits our preconceived notions; Wallace Stevens, corporate lawyer, does not.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poetry at Work: Dana Gioia and Can Poetry Matter?

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.