Colosseum Critical Introduction to Dana Gioia

"Dana Gioia has often been more admired and deplored as a literary and cultural celebrity than as a poet, even though he has published five collections of poems, has served as the California State Poet Laureate, has won the American Book Award, the Poets' Prize twice, and the Aiken Taylor Award, and has been canonized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. In the new century his fame was spurred by becoming chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2003 and by receiving the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2008. Before Gioia stepped down from the NEA in 2009, his reanimation of the downtrodden agency brought him renown as newly launched programs such as The Big Read and Poetry Out Loud reached both communities across the map and arts lovers from all generations. Another important venture of the Endowment under Gioia's direction, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, staged workshops for soldiers, their families, and other veterans. Their writings composed the anthology Operation Homecoming, which the Washington Post listed among the best works of nonfiction for 2006. All this meaningful work, however, came with a personal price: It kept Gioia from the writing desk, so much so that he began to wonder if the muse might desert him (Johnson 35). Earlier, in the nineties, he had drawn international attention as an iconoclastic critic for his controversial essay in the Atlantic Monthly, "Can Poetry Matter?" In the midst of the maelstrom surrounding the article, he published his second volume of verse, The Gods of Winter (1991). However, while the hotly contested essay made Gioia something of a household name, it also overshadowed his poetry. Even his initial emergence into the spotlight in the mid-eighties limited attention to his poems' intrinsic merits. While working as a marketing executive at General Foods and secretly publishing poems and criticism on the side, Gioia was unmasked in 1984 when his name made a list in Esquire of "Men and Women Under Forty Who Are Changing America" ("Being Outted"). This accolade helped Gioia's first book, Daily Horoscope (1986), reach a wide audience of readers and critics; nevertheless, the irrelevant fame of his business career led some reviewers to caricature his volume as catering to an audience of yuppie commuters (Peters 50) or to equate it with "The Poetry of Money" (the title of Greg Kuzma's dismissive review). The book, of course, won much high praise for its

שנה

2020

שפה

English

הוצאה

Franciscan Academic Press

מהדורות

1

עמודים

107

ISBN

9781733988957

מקור הנתונים: Wikidata