On Sept 27, The Chronicle of Higher Education, a subscription-based journal so I can't link it to any purpose, printed an article by John Palattella on the 10th anniversay of Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?". It's an odd article, but the oddest passage in it may be this:
Since when, as Gioia suggests, has a poet's primary obligation been to serve the interests of consumers? I don't mean to imply that poets don't desire an audience. But isn't the first duty of all poets not to readers but to language, their own as well as their culture's? And would it be so terrible if the only readers of a poet's work at any one time were other poets, especially if those readers grasped, appreciated, and promoted the work?
I wonder to whom the appreciative poet-readers would promote those works? Consumers? But even stranger than a writer showing such contempt for readers is the idea of duty to language. What the hell does that look like? Anybody got an idea?
BTW--a new poem this weekend, if the creek don't rise.
7:12:47 PM 
|
