'Responding to Dana Gioia's, "Can Poetry Matter?"' by Jake Berry at The Argotist Online
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Berry%20essay%202.htm
Excerpt:
Gioia seeks alternatives in the past, in how previous generations of poets managed to survive when their principle occupation could not sustain them. This is a valuable examination and it certainly bears consideration. And there are examples even today of poets surviving, and working, beyond the academic culture. Yet almost none of them are accepted as valid by that dominant culture. Hank Lazer made a strong argument in this regard in the two volumes of his Opposing Poetries. Those poetries being the academic, writing school poetry, which he calls "plainverse", and the, at that time, up and coming avant-garde which generally falls under the term 'language' poetry. Regarding this, it seems the academy has found a solution to revolt by taking a lesson from the markets of the 1970s. Rather than resist the burgeoning "revolution" against complacency and materialism it simply devoured it in the name of style and fashion and sold the trappings—the clothes, haircuts, and symbology—in a slightly refined form to the culture at large. The result was the decadence of the late 1970s and 1980s. Similarly, the academy has begun to absorb some of the language poets, often over the strenuous objection of the writing school poets, and has thereby transformed the avant-garde into a codified, institutionally verified avant-garde that can be taught (marketed) to a growing, though less popular, subculture. One can imagine a time (is that time already here?) when in order to be accepted as an avant-garde poet a young writer would be required to have a masters and possibly a doctorate in the avant-garde formula of the day. In such a condition anything genuinely avant-garde would be utterly dismissed, marginalized to the point of invisibility.
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