>From: Michael Snider <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
> poetics <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Regional Poetics?
>Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 04:01:21 -0400
>
>Sevanthi, we get to the very curious heart of it.
>
>I have only spoken with Dana Gioia one time, and that briefly. I don't
>know enough about him, or care enough about him, to spend any effort
>defending him. But I must say I find your response, "To put it
>indelicately, if I must, what he really meant is 'can poetry matter to
>the straight white men I work with?'" curious as it concerns Gioia and
>as it concerns the context in which your original "delicate" comment was
>made.
>
>The one time I did speak to Gioia, he got up to introduce himself to me
>(a bisexual) from a table where he had been sitting with Marilyn Nelson
>(a black woman), Tim Murphy, and Alan Sullivan (two gay farmers). The
>essay on accentual meters at Gioia's website uses as an example part of
>a translation of Beowulf by those same gay farmers. Rebel Angels, the
>more or less canonical anthology of New Formalist verse, has, among its
>25 poets, 10 women, at least 2 Latinos, at least 1 lesbian (Marilyn
>Hacker, whose poetry you say you admire), at least 2 gay men, and at
>least two Black folk. (I say "at least" because there are a number of
>poets in that uneven volume about whom I know nothing) The 2nd ed. of
>New Expansive Poetry includes an entire section of statements from Annie
>Finch's A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women.
>Are these women, these people of color, these gays and lesbians, just
>trying to ingratiate themselves with the corporate heterosexual white
>male? Please don't patronize them -- and I use that word deliberately --
>with talk of "false consciousness."
>
>About the context of your original remark: I had acknowledged, after
>reading your post, that my experience might be too parochial to be
>generalized, that you might have a very different experience than mine,
>and cited an essay of Gioia's which seemed, to me, to support that
>acknowledgement. Your "delicate" response was that more than regional
>differences were involved, and when I asked for an "indelicate"
>explanation of the difference between your experience and mine, you
>responded with an attack on Gioia's intentions in an essay which I had
>never mentioned -- implying, it seems to me, that I was another straight
>white man who just couldn't get it.
>
> Well, I'm white and male, but I'm not straight. My favorite in-law is
>black. I'm married to a woman, but I've slept with more men than
>women. In general, I prefer poetry in traditional meters, but much of
>my favorite poetry is in open forms. I write sonnets and I write free
>verse. I've taught at the University of Louisville, and I spent most of
>the 90s working as a framing carpenter. I was laid off a month ago from
>a job programming telephony applications for handheld computers. I sing
>and play mandolin in a band that plays working-class bars. You don't
>know me at all, yet it seems you've used an ideology to fit me into some
>pigeon-hole.
>
>Convince me I'm wrong.
Not to be rude, but convince me you can summarize my views in a way that I
would find credible.
I made a few arguments about the ways in which Dana Gioia's criticism (in re
poetry audiences, form, rap) is narrow, myopic and wrong-headed. There is
no question that his conception of poetry audiences, in Can Poetry Matter,
*is* extremely narrow, *does not* consider the social movements to which
poetry has been crucial, *does not* grapple with poetry in open forms which
has been quite popular, *is* concerned with a *particular* poetry audience
without being explicit/honest about it. Whether he has dinner with black
lesbians and/or includes them in his anthologies is not the bone of [my]
contention.
Nor for that matter, was my point wasn't that you were a "straight, white
man who couldn't get it," my point was that you didn't get it, and didn't
get it not because there aren't other people in Raleigh who don't get it,
but because your survey of tastes in poetry didn't include those people.
For example, I'd guess you don't know anyone who bought Sapphire, and yet
she's one of the most popular poets in the US.
In closing, I want to say that this is my last post in this exchange. I made
some substantive statements about form and poetry which seem to me to have
been ignored in favor of some not very interesting revelations about your
personal life. That's usually a sign that the subject has worn out its
interest.
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