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Sto caricando le informazioni... Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culturedi Dana Gioia
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"When Dana Gioia's essay "Can Poetry Matter?" appeared in the Atlantic in 1991, it sparked a firestorm of debate and discussion over the role of the poet in today's world - a dialogue in which Gioia participated on radio, television, and in print. One of the more stimulating and provocative figures on our literary horizon, and the author of two widely praised books of poems, Gioia is also an essayist of wide renown." "This collection of essays demonstrates that Gioia's talents do not lie in the area of controversy alone. Can Poetry Matter? is an old-fashioned sort of literary book, part literary criticism, part social commentary, and part plain good reading. Addressing such subjects as the poet as businessman and New Formalism as the real avant-garde, it also includes pieces on the life and work of such diverse figures as Robinson Jeffers, Weldon Kees, Robert Bly, and Wallace Stevens." "In an age when literary discourse often seems either bleached of any real content or academic to the point of inaccessibility, the essays in Can Poetry Matter? are certain to educate, provoke, and, perhaps most of all, delight readers. They also establish Dana Gioia as one of the foremost cultural observers of his generation."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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 Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni...GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)809.1Literature By Topic History, description and criticism of more than two literatures PoetryClassificazione LCVotoMedia: (3.98)
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Anybody who reads contemporary poetry or even is thinking about reading contemporary poetry should read the title essay, conveniently available at this link [PDF].
Gioia starkly outlines an artistic field that has decayed. There are more schools, magazines, grants, and awards than ever for working on poetry in the USA, but American poets mainly write elliptical, egotistical lyric poems, and honest appraisals of poetry are almost impossible to come by.
Gioia lays out a solemn decree to write good poetry criticism, and makes good on it in the fourteen pieces that follow. He gives elegant readings of poems, particularly when it comes to favorites like Robinson Jeffers, Weldon Kees, Howard Moss, and Donald Justice. These are all really important discoveries for me. Donald Justice, for example, generates poems out of previous poetry, including nursery rhymes as in "Counting the Mad:"
This one was put in a jacket,
This one was sent home,
This one was given bread and meat
But would eat none,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.
This one looked at the window
As though it were a wall,
This one saw things that were not there,
This one things that were,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.
This one though himself a bird,
This one a dog,
And this one thought himself a man,
An ordinary man,
And cried and cried No No No No
All day long.
The explanation for this poem is quite basic, but it's still fun to hear Gioia say it: "The harmless market-day adventures of five childlike pigs become a nightmarish tour of an insane asylum."
Equally fun are the withering, but balanced, critiques of James Dickey's collection Puella, Margaret Atwood, and especially Robert Bly:
Bly's weaknesses as a translator underscore his central failings as a poet. He is simplistic, monotonous, insensitive to sound, enslaved by literary diction, and pompously sentimental. Morever, these are not accidental faults. They are consequences of his poetic method and they are exacerbated by his didactic impulse.
In other short pieces on the long poem, new formalism, business and poetry, Gioia strays too much from reading poems, revealing a tendency to repeat himself. Even still, Gioia's essays are as clear as SAT reading samples, each with an easy to grasp thesis.
I want to write like this, making clear, reasonable claims about the directions of art, with incisive readings of poems guiding my way.