by David Lehman
Dana Gioia and I have been friends since we met in 1982. I know of no one more dedicated to literature and the arts in the largest sense: he loves to read and talk about poetry, and he is equally passionate and knowing about theater, opera, jazz, and painting. After a fling at Harvard as a graduate student in literature, Dana went to business school at Stanford and joined the ranks of maverick poets who earned their living in business or a profession rather than in academe. By day he worked for General Foods, but he managed to publish poems and ambitious essays in magazines such as The Hudson Review. He became a leader of the New Formalism, a movement determined to restore to poetry the importance formerly placed on rhyme, meter, and traditional form. He also translated Montale, helped make the case for the underrated Weldon Kees, and wrote touching personal memoirs about Elizabeth Bishop (whom he had come to know while at Harvard) and John Cheever.
After giving up his business career to give more time to the literary life, Dana wrote poems and essays and opera libretti, edited textbooks and anthologies, translated Seneca, collaborated with all sorts of folks on all sorts of worthy projects. But he had another surprise in store for us. In 2003 he became the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, in which capacity he served for six years. When he took the helm, the organization was in bad odor. In a burst of energy he refashioned its image and resuscitated its reputation. He launched initiatives to enlarge the readership for serious literature (“The Big Read”); to promote the memorization of verse (“Poetry Out Loud”); to provide “creative art therapy” to returning veterans (“Operation Homecoming”); to produce Shakespeare plays in untraditional venues, such as military bases; and to contrive new ways to celebrate our heroes of opera and jazz. And he managed to sell the arts to congressmen not necessarily disposed to be supportive.
It is safe to say that not since Archibald MacLeish headed the Library of Congress has a poet worked so hard, and accomplished so much of value, in so prominent a position in the federal government. Not everyone can see beyond his or her essential understanding of poetry to be able to acknowledge the legitimacy of rival conceptions. Dana has that ability and in this book has done his best to represent the remarkable variety to be found in American poetry at its best in 2018.
We lost two titans in 2017: at the age of ninety, John Ashbery died on September 3; Richard Wilbur passed on October 14, aged ninety-six.6
A graduate of Amherst College (class of 1942), Dick Wilbur served during World War II with the 36th Infantry Division. He saw action in Italy, France, and Germany. Upon his return he taught at his alma mater and at Harvard, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Smith. He liked living in the country. With his wife, Charlee, to whom he was devoted, he lived in Cummington, Massachusetts, birthplace of William Cullen Bryant, and spent many springs in Key West, Florida. In 2004 his Collected Poems 1943–2004 appeared from Harcourt. Twice he won the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, and his translations from seventeenth-century French drama (Molière, Racine, Corneille) are performed widely. Wilbur’s mastery of rhetoric and command of poetic form is or should be self-evident to all who have wrestled with words and their meanings. In his poems he weds deep humane intelligence with superb technique and unfailing fealty to the ideals of beauty and truth. “A poem should not be like a Double-Crostic; it should not be the sort of puzzle in which you get nothing until you get it all,” he wrote. “Art does not or should not work that way; we are not cheated of a symphony if we fail to react to some passage on the flute, and a good poem should yield itself more than once, offering the reader an early and sure purchase, and deepening repeatedly as he comes to know it better.”
Dick was the most genial and gracious of individuals. I profited from his expertise on many subjects: Edgar Allan Poe, the great American songbook, French classical tragedy, May Swenson, riddles, the haiku stanza put to narrative or expository use. Twelve guest editors in this series have selected Wilbur’s poems. His contributor’s note in The Best American Poetry 1999 concluded: “His several books for children have amused some adults.” There then followed this comment on his poem “This Pleasing Anxious Being”: “I think that people resist as long as they can a full sense of the world’s change and of their own aging. At last, when a certain number of irreplaceable people are gone, and the home place has been razed, and one is the only rememberer of certain things, the gut acknowledges what the mind has always thought it knew. That is the source of this poem, which moves both back and forward in time, and considers time in a number of perspectives. The title is taken from the twenty-second stanza of Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’ ”
Three days before John Ashbery died, my wife and I saw Marjorie Prime, Michael Almereyda’s latest movie, with an all-star cast (Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Lois Smith) and wonderful samplings of a Beethoven string quartet, Poulenc, Mozart, “I Shall Be Released,” and the dialogue of Casablanca. But the highlight of Marjorie Prime occurs when the character played by Tim Robbins reads aloud a love letter addressed to his mother-in-law, now deceased, said to have been written by a tennis-playing French-Canadian suitor who expresses the usual sentiments then abruptly switches to the first six lines of John Ashbery’s “At North Farm”:
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?
I phoned John the next evening to tell him of our pleasure in hearing these lines. Aside from an intermittent cough, John sounded like John, and it gives me pleasure to report that he remained his witty, droll, clever, charming self right up to the end. A few days later I was writing copy in the past tense.
John was a mentor to me and a good friend. I went to readings he gave in my sophomore year at Columbia and was, like many of my classmates, blown away by his long poem “The Skaters,” which many of my buddies on the Columbia Review, committed as we were to the aesthetic of the New York School, thought was the single finest long poem in English since “The Waste Land.” He very quickly became my favorite poet.
Some of his friends called him Ashes. I favored JA in part because of his brilliant early poem “The Picture of Little JA in a Prospect of Flowers,” the title of which was itself a lift from a poem by Andrew Marvell. We—those of us privileged enough to get close to the man—would entertain one another with anecdotes about him, clever things he said, or just news of a great new poem, such as “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” which knocked our socks off when it appeared in Poetry magazine in 1974. A year later it was the title poem of a poetry collection that went on to capture the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, an unprecedented triple crown.
It was my great good luck that our professional paths crossed three significant times in the 1970s and 1980s. John and I shared an office at Brooklyn College the year I taught there. Later, when I reviewed books for Newsweek, John was the magazine’s art critic. And when I launched The Best American Poetry series in 1988 with Scribner, JA was our first guest editor. So it was not only as a poet but also as a teacher, a critic, a journalist, and an editor that he inspired me.
My lifelong devotion to John’s work is reflected in such publications as Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery (1980) and The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1998). In 1984 Harvey Shapiro of The New York Times Magazine phoned and commissioned a profile for the magazine’s “creative mind” series. I’m glad I got to interview him formally, though I never met anyone cagier; to simulate a conversation with him in public, which we did several times, required ingenuity and the willingness to look foolish. Sometimes things he said in interviews entered the general discourse. “Often people don’t listen to you when you speak to them. It’s only when you ta
lk to yourself that they prick up their ears.” And: “I am aware of the pejorative associations of the word ‘escapist,’ but I insist that we need all the escapism we can get and even that isn’t going to be enough.”
Strikingly different in many particulars, Ashbery and Wilbur have in common a profound understanding of English and American poetry as a living, constantly evolving thing with a great past that we can best cherish by treating it as part of our present. The poems of these exemplars will continue to nourish us for decades to come. Of few predictions can I be so confident.
* * *
1. Robert P. Baird, “Can Kevin Young Make Poetry Matter Again?,” Esquire, November 6, 2017, at http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a13135556/kevin-young-poetry/.
2. Robert P. Baird, “Spend It All,” Best American Poetry blog, January 13, 2012, at http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/01/spend-it-all-by-robert-p-baird.html.
3. Shagpat is the tyrant whose power inheres in his hair in George Meredith’s novel The Shaving of Shagpat. “Rhyme removed, much ethereal music leaps up from the word, music which has hitherto chirped unnoticed in the expanse of prose. Any rhyme forbidden, many Shagpats were unwigged.”—T. S. Eliot, “Reflections on Vers Libres” (1917).
4. Carl Wilson, “Why Rupi Kaur and Her Peers Are the Most Popular Poets in the World,” The New York Times, December 15, 2017; Nina Sovich, “My Love Is Like a Hashtag: ‘Instagram Poets’ Sell Well,” The Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2017; Priya Khaira-Hanks, “Rupi Kaur: The Inevitable Backlash Against Instagram’s Favourite Poet,” The Guardian, October 4, 2017. The only lines of verse quoted in Nina Sovich’s “My Love Is Like a Hashtag” were “Love made / her wild” by Thom Young, apparently a swipe at the pseudonymous Atticus, author of Love Her Wild (Atria Books).
5. MedusaSansFrontières, OpheliaInWaders, and IanWhittington, @Sir__Ian, are the Twitter handles.
6. As we go to press, the sad news reaches me that Donald Hall died two days ago. In addition to all his other accomplishments, and there are many, Don served as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1989, the second volume in this series. He was a great friend and mentor, and his ideas and methods, based on years of experience as an anthologist, proved invaluable to me in subsequent years —DL, June 25, 2018
Dana Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. He received his BA and MBA from Stanford University and an MA in comparative literature from Harvard University. Gioia, who has served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is the author of five full-length collections of poetry, most recently 99 Poems: New & Selected. Currently the Poet Laureate of California, he has written three opera libretti, edited anthologies, and translated poetry from Latin, Italian, and German. In 1991 his essay “Can Poetry Matter?” made a dent in the national consciousness. As chairman of the NEA, Gioia garnered bipartisan support in the United States Congress for public funding of the arts and arts education. (Business Week referred to him as “the man who saved the NEA.”) “Poetry Out Loud,” one of his several initiatives, involves nearly half a million high school students across the country in a national poetry recitation contest that awards $50,000 in scholarships. “Operation Homecoming” brought distinguished American authors to conduct workshops among troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011 Gioia became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California, where he teaches each fall semester. He has received ten honorary degrees. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California.
INTRODUCTION
* * *
by Dana Gioia
American poetry is thriving. American poetry is in decline. The poetry audience has never been bigger. The audience has dropped to historic lows. The mass media ignores poetry. The media has rediscovered it. There have never been so many opportunities for poets. American poets find fewer options each year. The university provides a vibrant environment for poets. Academic culture has become stagnant and remote. Literary bohemias have been destroyed by gentrification and rising real estate prices. New bohemias have emerged across the nation. All of these contradictory statements are true, and all of them are false, depending on your point of view. The state of American poetry is a tale of two cities.
Consider the question of poetry’s current audience. In traditional terms, poetry’s audience has declined significantly in recent years. According to the massive Survey for Public Participation in the Arts conducted at five-year intervals by the National Endowment for the Arts, poetry readership dropped from 20 percent of the adult population in 1982 to nearly 7 percent in 2012. Poetry’s slump matched a larger decline in all sorts of literary reading among every sector of the population. Poetry’s situation seemed dire.
Cultural trends, however, are rarely linear. When things change, they often change direction. There was one odd statistic in the 2012 NEA poetry data, which was inconsistent with all the other measurements. The youngest group of adults (ages 18–24) read more poetry than any other segment. This result was puzzling because for years younger Americans read less of everything—poetry, fiction, books, magazines, newspapers—than older groups. No one much noticed the anomaly, even though American culture is often led by youth trends. Then in the next NEA report in 2017, national poetry readership nearly doubled to 12 percent. Poetry was suddenly a rapidly growing art form with 28 million adult readers. What was going on?
It was a tale of poetry’s two overlapping cities—print versus performance. Culture is hard to measure in times of social and technological change. The NEA study measures conventional literary reading among American adults (print plus ebooks and text-based internet). It doesn’t track anyone under eighteen. The survey also doesn’t include poetry readings—live or in the media—as part of “literary reading.” Meanwhile a huge cultural shift has occurred outside the scope of the survey among youth involved in performance and digital media. Technology has allowed poetry, which had begun in preliterate societies as a spoken art, to reconnect with its auditory origins. Print now coexists with other equally powerful media for poetry.
The chief way American poets now reach their audience is through readings, either live or transmitted by radio, television, and internet. The new venues, such as YouTube, haven’t replaced print, but they have amplified it. The interest and excitement fostered by the new auditory culture has nurtured a new readership for print poetry. This trend has changed poetry culture, especially for young or emerging writers.
In a culture where elite journals such as The Yale Review or The Hopkins Review have circulation under a thousand copies, a teenager’s homemade YouTube video with 1,100 hits may reach more “readers.” Poetry performance is no longer confined to small, local events—a few poets reading in a half-empty café. Some slam poetry videos have reached millions of viewers. In a more academic context, four million teenagers have participated in “Poetry Out Loud,” the national high school poetry recitation contest. Many of them film and post their performances. As the new NEA statistics suggest, the new and ubiquitous auditory media have helped increase poetry’s print readership.
Spoken word and performance poetry don’t replace written work. The new forms exist as alternative approaches to the same art—one focused on the page, the other on the stage. The different forms, however, influence each other. It is impossible to read new literary poems without noticing how much more important sound has become.
Younger poets have grown up hearing the beat, rhyme, and wordplay of hip-hop. They read their poems aloud to live audiences. They have also felt the power of oral poetry’s self-presentation—a performer speaking directly to an audience. There is nothing surprising about the influence of the new forms of oral poetry. Spoken language constantly revitalizes the written word. Why else did Dante give up the prestige of Latin for the vulgar Italian tongue? Or Langston Hughes use the sounds of Harlem speech and sung blues?
If anyone doubts poetry’s new media presenc
e, turn on the television. In recent years poetry has become a code for sophistication. Sometimes entire poems are quoted. More often lines are quoted at critical junctures of the plot—sometimes with acknowledgment, sometimes without. Occasionally, a poem appears throughout an entire series as a thematic signal. Breaking Bad used Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” The Mentalist employed William Blake’s “The Tyger.” Poetry is now even used in commercials. Volvo adapted Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.” Apple iPad presented Robin Williams crooning the Good Gray Bard’s “O Me! O Life!”
One might expect verse to appear in genteel hits such as The Crown, Downton Abbey, and Victoria. But poetry now works its way into such teen fare as The Magicians, Supernatural, Legion, Fringe, Being Human, Penny Dreadful, Mr. Robot, Scream, and The Simpsons. Poems are also frequently quoted on mainstream shows such as Bones, Elementary, Forever, Revenge, Longmire, House of Cards, Castle, Mad Men, Parks and Recreation, and 30 Rock. It happens so often that the Netflix viewer is no longer surprised to hear Sheriff Longmire read John Donne in his Wyoming office or correct the scansion of a murderer’s doggerel.
