Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture Book

I came to read this book in a roundabout way. I had never heard of Dana Gioia until I read a poem of his in Garrison Keillor's WRITER'S ALMANAC which appears in my e-mail box every day; some of these poems are excellent, some forgettable. Gioia's "The Lost Garden", about memory and what we make of the past fell into my excellent category, and that got me interested in Gioia. I found several of his poetry collections in the library as well as this collection of essays which were surprisingly interesting.

Is poetry disappearing? The lead piece says that printed poetry may well be in a permanent state of feebleness. It appeals to a very small group of readers, but that doesn't mean poetry is dead. Rather, it has become popular in oral forms such as cowboy poetry, poetry slams, and especially rap. It is true that the decline of print culture has been hard on literary poets who have no way of reaching a wide audience, assuming that there even is such an audience. But oral performance poetry is thriving and Gioia thinks this is simply reaffirming what a dramatist like Shakespeare knew centuries ago - poetry has to be heard to be appreciated, and as long as it talks about the important things of life there is an audience for it.

The longest piece in the collection is about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the precipitous decline of his literary reputation. He was the most popular American poet who ever lived, becoming rich from the sale of his books and in the 19th century his extraordinary cultural influence, Gioia says, was close to what today would be the impact of popular music and movies. He was astonishingly prolific, writing short lyric poetry as well as long historical narratives such as EVANGELINE and HIAWATHA (so popular it was translated into every European language, as well as into Latin). He was a master of intricate metrical forms and was was one of the first to combine his writing talents with academia and became a prototype of the poet/professor, today the only way a print poet can make a living.

What happened to Longfellow's reputation? He was a victim of Modernism which in literary terms loved contradiction, intensity, compression, elliptical expression. Longfellow had none of these, and worse, he had a tendency toward didacticism, anathema to modern critics and readers who find this kind of poetry as offering sugar-coated pills of "truth", not much above banal greeting card verse. However, as Gioia astutely points out, didacticism hasn't disappeared from popular culture - it has simply shifted into self-help books and is now more popular than ever. So, Longfellow has been banished, and the l9th century poet now favored is Emily Dickenson, a non-entity in Longfellow's era.

Most of the rest of the book is made up of shorter pieces assessing individual poets. His comments got me interested in a few I had not heard of or had forgotten about. Among them: Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, James Tate, Weldon Kees, William Jay Smith. He has a intriguing piece on Robert Frost, the split between his actual life, and his poetry. He concludes that as long as poetry speaks to, and celebrates, the concerns of everyday life, whatever its form, there will always be an audience for it.