Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture
- Book Review,
by Dana Gioia
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Like his 1992 collection Can Poetry Matter? Gioia's book is named after the first piece in it. And it is no less affirmative about poetry than Gioia's answer to its predecessor's query. If print culture is vanishing, Gioia says in "Disappearing Ink," poetry isn't going with it. The phenomena of rap, poetry slams, performance poetry, and cowboy poetry suggest that poetry is spreading among the young and nonreaders as well as among those who will be tomorrow's print-loving old fogies. Moreover, rap and cowboy poetry, with audiences bigger than those for perf-po and slams, are reviving what makes verse memorable: rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance and consonance, storytelling. In fact, Gioia concludes, the new populism of rap and the rest is affecting literary poetry, mostly for the better. Far from dying, poetry is in flux, and that is a recurring theme in the other essays, most of them about particular poets, saliently including the most popular American poet ever, Longfellow; the mid-twentieth-century poet most favored by other poets and disdained by critics, Weldon Kees; the unexpected newest member of the American poetry canon, Elizabeth Bishop; and the most controversial great American poet, Robert Frost. Whatever the topic, Gioia always shows us how to read and hear poetry better, and always in the manner of a comrade, not a professor. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Can Poetry Matter? is an important book, and anyone who professes to care about the state of American poetry will have to take it into account." --World Literature Today
Book Description
The Celebrated poet and author of Can Poetry Matter?offers another bold, insightful collection of essays on literature's changing place in contemporary culture
Poetry is an art that preceded writing, and it will survive television and video games . . . The problem won't be finding an audience. The challenge will be writing well enough to deserve one.
In Disappearing Ink, Dana Gioia stakes the claim for poetry's place amid American popular culture, where poetry in its latest oral forms -rap, slam, performance-is transforming the traditional literary culture of the printed page. But, as the seminal title essay asks, "What is a conscientious critic supposed to do with an Eminem or Jay-Z?" In a brilliant array of essays that test the pulse of traditional and contemporary poetry, Gioia ponders the future of the written word and how it might find its most relevant incarnation.
With the clarity, wit, and feisty intelligence that made Can Poetry Matter? one of the most important and controversial books about literature and contemporary American society, Gioia again demonstrates his unique abilities of observation and uncanny prognostication to examine our complicated everyday relationship to art.
About the Author
Dana Gioia is the author of three collections of poetry: Daily Horoscope, The Gods of Winter, and Interrogations at Noon, which won the American Book Award. He is the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
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