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Originally Posted by tmc
I had forgotten about Gioia's article, having seen it when first published years ago. It is wonderfully written and goes directly to my point; I guess our differences are that he has the time and inclination to dredge through mountains of muck for a single nugget.
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No, not a single nugget. By Gioia's own admission, "a period of genuine achievement" and an "impressive and diverse range of new poetry." If you are counting on major prize winners or what you might hear in passing on public radio to weed out the muck for you, I fear your opinion may not change much.
You might also enjoy Donald Hall's article "Death to the Death of Poetry."
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People who at the age of fifty deplore the death of poetry are the same people who in their twenties were "taught to exalt it." The middle-aged poetry detractor is the student who hyperventilated at poetry readings thirty years earlier--during Wilson's "Pound-Sandburg era" or Epstein's aura-era of "T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams." After college many English majors stop reading contemporary poetry. Why not? They become involved in journalism or scholarship, essay writing or editing, brokerage or social work; they backslide from the undergraduate Church of Poetry. Years later, glancing belatedly at the poetic scene, they tell us that poetry is dead. They left poetry; therefore they blame poetry for leaving them. Really, they lament their own aging. Don't we all? But some of us do not blame the current poets.
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Death to the Death of Poetry - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More