Word: gioia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Gioia points to the widespread incorporation of creative writing into the academy as a key source of public indifference. Where poets once scraped by in bohemia, brooding over coffee in French cafes, today many teach writing at the secondary or post-secondary school level. Where celebrated poets like Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams earned livings as corporate insurance lawyer, banker and physician, respectively, today "the poet...has reluctantly become an educational specialist...
...academic, the poet must publish or perish. This helps account for the explosion of small presses and journals "like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants." Gioia sees little quality control, little honest reviewing and thus great reason for the general reader to be turned off. Can Poetry Matter? reads as an expose of the literary scene. Gioia accuses poets of maintaining a virtual conspiracy of silence, of refusing to publish negative reviews. At one point, he even invokes the names of Woodward and Bernstein, the celebrated journalists that uncovered Watergate...
...Gioia presents the academy as a comfortable, clubby home to poets, and poetry as a "modestly upwardly mobile, middle class profession--not as lucrative as waste management or dermatology, but several big steps above the squalor of bohemia." With lines like these, is it any wonder the title essay caused such a stir...
...Part of Gioia's mission, it seems, is to break the polite silence, to tell it like it is. His prose is irreverent and refreshing. How many professional writers would dare claim that "the editorial principle governing selection [for an important anthology] seems to have been the fear of leaving out some influential colleague?" Or that "one suspects that [this anthology] was never truly meant to be read, only assigned." Whether you agree or disagree with Gioia's particulars, you can't help but admire his candor...
...suspects that Gioia writes freely about the academy because he worked outside of it for most of his career. For 15 years, he earned a living as a businessman. He rose to Vice President of General Foods before leaving in 1992 to write full time...