Can poetry matter dana gioia biography
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[Editor's Note: The Tenth Anniversary Edition of Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture will be published in August 2002 by Graywolf Press. For more information concerning Dana Gioia, please click here.]
No one expected the huge response that "Can Poetry Matter?" generated, especially not its author. Although no one believes me, I did not set out to create a controversy. I was simply trying to address--as directly and candidly as possible--the increasing isolation of American poetry in our culture. On occasion I had the sense that I might be expressing an arguable proposition, but ironically those passages have been the ones to escape scrutiny. What stirred debate and even denunciation in some circles were assumptions that seemed to me utterly beyond argument--especially the notions that poetry had once been popular in the United States, that a larger and
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A review of Can Poetry Matter By Dana Gioia
The reader will not need to agree with Gioia to enjoy this book. It constitutes by the naturlig eller utan tillsats of its subject a kringirrande into both the unknown and the unknowable. But Gioia seldom goes so far into speculation that he has not something pertinent to offer.
Reviewed by Bob Williams
Can Poetry Matter?
bygd Dana Gioia
Graywolf Press
2002, ISBN 1-55597-370-1, $16.00, 231 pages
Dana Gioia has an ubiquitous position on the Web where his encyclopedic treatment of individual poets is often useful. He intends this book to be forthright and written in an accessible manner. For those who have the original 1992 edition, it is necessary to point out that this edition differs from it only by the addition of a five-page introduction and a few brief postscripts. The introduction measures the differences, mostly signs of what Gioia perceives as healthy progress, in the past decade.
Tacitly Gioia assumes a Golden Age from which we have sadly decline
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Dana Gioia
American poet and writer
Michael Dana Gioia (; born December 24, 1950) is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
Since the early 1980s, Gioia has been considered part of the highly controversial and counterculturalliterary movements within American poetry known as New Formalism, which advocates the continued writing of poetry in rhyme and meter, and New Narrative, which advocates the telling of non-autobiographical stories. Gioia has also argued in favor of a return to the past tradition of poetry translators replicating the rhythm and verse structure of the original poem.
Gioia helped renew the popularity of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the rediscovery of Weldon Kees and John Allan Wyeth. He also co-founded the annual West Chester University Poetry Conference, which has run annually since 1995.
At the request of U.S. PresidentGeorge W. Bush, Gioia served between 2003 and 2009 as the chairman of the National Endowment for the A