Summary
In 1991, Dana Gioia published his celebrated essay “Does Poetry Matter?” in which he argued that poetry had become irrelevant to mainstream American culture. It no longer had a readership among the educated public but was confined to a small subculture located entirely in universities. Poets no longer wrote for a general audience, he said, but for other poets, which is to say other professors of English and creative writing, graduate students, and a small coterie of editors, publishers, and administrators. In “Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture,” the title piece in this collection of literary essays, Gioia revisits the same topic more than a decade later. He finds that poetry does still matter, in part because new, popular forms of poetry have sprung up to revitalize the art. These, in turn, are having an influence on the insular world of academic poetry.
Gioia begins by describing the immense cultural shift currently under way in which print no longer holds the prime position it has occupied for hundreds of years. People read much less than they used to. Gioia refers to a study which found that the average American spends only twenty-four minutes per day reading, compared to more than four hours watching television and more than three hours listening to the radio. This trend toward the oral and the visual over the written word is even more pronounced among the young.
However, what Gioia calls the end of print culture has led not to the demise of poetry but to a resurgence of popular poetry in a variety of forms: rap, cowboy poetry, poetry slams, and performance poetry. These have all become significant forces in American culture, especially rap, and they have risen without any support from academic institutions. Gioia argues that these new forms and their success “demonstrate the abiding human need for poetry,” although he does not argue that any of these forms are producing poetry of great quality. What is important is their vitality and popular appeal.
Gioia isolates four fundamental ways in which the new poetry differs from traditional literary poetry. First, it is predominantly oral and is often recited from memory. Some of it is never written down and so avoids print culture altogether. For Gioia, this shows how electronic media like television, radio, and recordings have changed the forms of literature. Readers are being turned into listeners and approach poetry in ways that are conditioned by television and radio.
Second, these new forms emerged from outside the established literary culture and were developed by those marginalized by intellectual society. Rap, according to Gioia, was the creation of young African American males in the 1970's and has since become an international form. Cowboy poetry represents the revival of the verse that Western cattle drivers performed to entertain themselves. Poetry slams, in which poets perform in a competition and are judged by the audience, were invented in 1985 at a bar in Chicago.
The third characteristic of the new poetry is its overwhelmingly formal nature. It unashamedly uses rhyme and meter, the traditional tools of the poet that modern academic poets tend to reject as old-fashioned. Here Gioia does what few academics would care to do: He takes rap seriously enough to discuss it in terms of its formal patterns. He acknowledges that rap uses a variety of metrical forms, but the commonest one is rhymed couplets that mix full rhyme with assonance. Rap uses the same four-stress accentual line that for hundreds of years was the most common meter for spoken popular poetry in English.
Cowboy poetry uses the same meter...
(This entire section contains 1850 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
but in the form of a variation in the traditional ballad stanza. Rap and cowboy poets revel in their skill with formal elements because they know that this is how they connect with their listening audience—something that academic poets, used to silent reading of their poems, neglect.
Gioia's final point about the new wave of popular poetry is that it is exactly that—popular. It attracts a huge paying public. It thrives in the marketplace. Rap can be called the only literary form that is popular among American youth of all races. Even cowboy poetry, which is a regional rather than national phenomenon, plays to capacity audiences across the West, and poetry slams fill bars and cafés throughout the United States.
Having identified these four aspects of the new poetry, Gioia then argues that literary poetry is undergoing similar changes, also spurred by technological and cultural changes. He claims that even literary poets now reach more people through poetry readings than through print. A book alone will not be sufficient to attract a readership. This represents a significant shift, even in the world of the universities, from the printed page to the spoken word.
This shift is creating a breakup of literary poetry into four new forms. The first is performance poetry, which emerged from the poetry reading and which exploits the physical presence of the performer. The second is oral poetry, which when applied to literary poetry is known as spoken word poetry, a form that now has a serious following, notably in San Francisco. The third form is audiovisual, poetry which can work equally well as a typographic entity and as a spoken performance. The fourth form is visual poetry, which depends for at least some of its effect on its appearance on the printed page. An extreme form of this is concrete poetry, where the typographical design of the poem, as in John Hollander's “Swan,” is essential to its meaning.
Literary poets are being driven into these new forms, Gioia argues, because the decline of print culture has meant that reviews, literary criticism, anthologies, and general press coverage have all diminished over the past few decades. All in all, Gioia does not see this as a bad thing for literary poetry, as he believes that the new oral culture has created the conditions for its revival: “The relation between print and speech in American culture today is probably closer to that in [William] Shakespeare's age than [T. S.] Eliot's era—not an altogether bad situation for a poet.” Gioia sees the possibility for the first time in a century of literary poetry “reengaging a nonspecialized audience of artists and intellectuals, both in and out of the academy.” Nothing if not an optimist, Gioia suggests that this poetry of the future may come closer to the work of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and John Milton—all poets who knew how to write for the spoken word—than to the poets in the Modernist tradition who relied solely on print culture.
The remainder of the book is a potpourri of literary essays, all written in Gioia's accessible, readable style. He writes as an enthusiast rather than a scholar, and his love of literature, as well as his astute insights and observations, are apparent on every page. In the two other essays that have been grouped under the section heading “Disappearing Ink,” Gioia discusses the peculiar pleasure and sense of magic that a reader feels when examining a literary manuscript written in the poet's own hand. He observes that so often, some aspect of the writer's character can be discerned through his or her handwriting. Also, a handwritten manuscript creates a sense of communion between writer and reader that is absent in a typescript or a printed page. The third essay in this section is a plea for a reevaluation of the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow was the most revered poet of his day but has fallen into neglect today, a neglect Gioia regards as unjust.
Although Gioia has spent some twenty years living in New York, he was born and raised in California and considers himself to be a California poet. The second section of Disappearing Ink is titled “West Coast Elegies” and includes eight essays about poets and poetry from that region. In “Fallen Western Star: The Decline of San Francisco as a Literary Region,” he points out the difference between San Francisco in the early twentieth century, when it was a major literary center where new writers flourished and new trends emerged, and the absence of such a literary culture today. Even though numerous writers live in the region, it lacks the “literary ecosystem”—newspapers, magazines, and publishers that promote local talent—that it formerly possessed. These outlets for writers have either folded or moved to New York.
It is the Northeast that now has a monopoly on the formation of literary opinion and reputation. Gioia speculates that the reason for this is that in California, the literary life tends to be private and individual. Writers live far apart and do not meet often, unlike in New York, where cultural life is public and social, and new literary ventures are more easily started. This gap between East and West Coast lifestyles has an effect on the nation's literary culture. Gioia points out that it is harder to create and sustain a literary reputation from the West Coast. Some of California's greatest poets, like Robinson Jeffers, Ivor Winters, and Kenneth Rexroth never won a Pulitzer Prize, even though they were, in Gioia's opinion, superior to many of the New York writers honored by the Manhattan-based Pulitzer committee. Gioia concludes this essay by raising wider concerns, of whether any regional literature can maintain an identity in the face of the global standardization of electronic media and the centralization of national literary opinion in New York.
In other essays in this section, Gioia reassesses Rexroth's work, writes appreciatively about West Coast Beat poet William Everson and poets Kay Ryan and John Haines. He also examines the life and career of Jack Spicer, one of the bohemian poets who lived in San Francisco in the middle of the last century, and investigates why Weldon Kees, a San Francisco-based poet who, since his disappearance and presumed suicide in 1955, has been accorded cult status among poets but has been virtually ignored by academic critics.
The final section of the book, “All I Have Is a Voice,” is a miscellany, beginning with the title essay about Gioia's experience of reading poetry to audiences in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The other essays include assessments of the work of poets such as Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Hall, Philip Levine, Peter Davison, Randall Jarrell, Janet Lewis, Samuel Menashe, and Donald Justice, as well as reviews of a new biography of Robert Frost. In these essays, and throughout the book, Gioia's voice is always engaging. He has an eye for the revealing anecdote, and he often illuminates a poet's work from an angle not taken by other critics or commentators. He brings to his literary work the sensibilities of a working poet as well as the insights of a critic. Readers who enjoy traveling to both well-known and lesser-known regions of the literary landscape will find Disappearing Ink a very satisfying book.
Review Sources
Booklist 101, no. 4 (October 15, 2004): 377.
Library Journal 129, no. 20 (December 1, 2004): 117.
The Nation 279, no. 10 (October 4, 2004): 23.
The New York Times Book Review 154 (November 21, 2004): 16.
The Wall Street Journal 244, no. 80 (October 22, 2004): W5.
