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Introduction Slam and the Search for Poetry’s Great Audience To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too. —Walt Whitman, “Ventures, on an Old Theme,” 1892 Anyone who hopes to broaden poetry’s audience—critic, teacher, librarian, poet, or lonely literary amateur—faces a daunting challenge. How does one persuade justly skeptical readers, in terms they can understand and appreciate, that poetry still matters? —Dana Gioia, “Can Poetry Matter?” 1992 On or about August 1988, contemporary American poetry changed. The relations between poetry and its audience—between academics and their venerated tomes, MFA students and their assigned readings, rappers and the rhymes they busted—shifted. The catalyst for this shift was the claim that poetry and the intellectual culture it inspired was dead. In August 1988, Commentary published Joseph Epstein’s editorial “Who Killed Poetry?” which made the familiar claim that poetry was rarely enjoyed outside of a small subculture of readers. The cause for this “vacuum,” Epstein posited, was the vast and growing number of academic creative writing programs in the United States and the poets ‹rmly ensconced there as teachers.1 The following year, the Writer’s Chronicle, a trade magazine published by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, reprinted Epstein’s essay along with responses from 101 writers over the span of three issues. One of those writers was the poet-critic Dana Gioia (now chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), who published an extended version of this response entitled “Can Poetry Matter?” in the April 1991 Atlantic. He collected this and other essays about poetry in an eponymous book in 1992. In this title essay, Gioia furthered Epstein’s argument, claiming that Americans lived within a “divided literary culture,” one that had a “superabundance of poetry within a small class and [an] impoverishment outside it. One might even say that outside the classroom—where soci- ety demands that the two groups interact—poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms.” Poetry, he argued, had lost its larger nonacademic audience, which “cut across lines of race, class, age, and occupation” and was “poetry’s bridge to the general culture.” Gioia placed the onus of poetry’s subcultural status on poets who had abandoned working-class bohemia for academic careers.2 The dire situation of verse was only to be remedied, he argued, by seeking an audience for poetry outside of the academy. The volume of responses to Gioia’s essay was overwhelming—the Atlantic received more letters about it than any other article in decades. Reactions were also severe—especially, as one might expect, from poets teaching in academic writing programs. The essay’s popularity inspired a wave of criticism for those waging the debate as well. Donald Hall’s 1989 essay in Harper’s magazine, “Death to the Death of Poetry,” accused poets of such navel gazing: “While most readers and poets agree that ‘nobody reads poetry’—and we warm ourselves by the gregarious ‹res of our solitary art—maybe a multitude of nobodies assembles the great audience Whitman looked for.”3 Similarly, the poet Richard Tillinghast speculated in the Writer’s Chronicle, “Perhaps the crisis of con‹dence among poets, the unseemly hand-wringing, reveals that many of us really are af›icted with Nielsen Ratings syndrome, that we are not writing for the work’s sake but from a desire to be noticed.”4 Both authors were quite right. In essence, what these critics debated was not the state or quality of poetry itself but the urgency with which poetry needed to seek public attention. Without a relationship with popular audiences—or at the very least a relationship with a small intelligentsia outside of the academy—poetry, Gioia and others claimed, was doomed to a dinosaur’s fate. Engaging a classic tension between the academy and the public and the verse produced within these spheres, the argument was a fresh iteration of what Walt Whitman had been concerned with a century earlier: ‹nding poetry’s great audience. Part of this resurgence of interest in poetry’s popularity resulted in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry series edited by David Lehman, which was itself initiated in 1988. The concern for poetry’s livelihood carried on through the 1990s. In 1996, the Academy of American Poets —a long-standing nonpro‹t organization supporting American poets and poetry—proclaimed April National Poetry Month. One of its ‹rst projects was to hand out thousands of copies of T. S...

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