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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Kevin Walzer, a poet, poetry publisher, husband, and father.
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Thu, 13 Apr 2006
Two essential programming books
Two essential programming books on my shelf are Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk by Brent Welch and AppleScript: The Definitive Guide by Matt Neuburg. These two books are the best in their respective fields--lucid enough for the beginning programmer, comprehensive enough for the expert. I have yet to exhaust either of them.
The Neuburg book has just come out in a second edition, and I'm going to try to review it in this space a bit later. There are rumours of a new editions of the Welch book, but those are unconfirmed.
Book of the Day: Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture by Dana Gioia
One of the things I want to do with this blog is talk about books that I've found moving, challenging, or otherwise worthy of my attention as a reader. This will include books of poetry, books about poetry, books about computer programming, and other topics of interest. I'll shamelessly admit that these will occasionally include the books I publish: why would I be a publisher otherwise? Before anything else, I'm a reader, a lover of books. But I'll also include books I haven't published.
I'll begin with a book I didn't publish: Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture by Dana Gioia (2004). Gioia is a noted poet and critic who achieved great notoriety with the publication of his first collection of essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1992). Previously a business executive, he made his living as an independent writer when the essays of the new collection were written, then assumed the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts, a position he still holds.
Disappearing Ink's title essay is the book's most provocative one, in which Gioia takes a broad look at the state of poetry in our postmodern, multimedia age. Gioia argues that poetry's cultural place is rapdily changing, moving from a purely literary realm embraced by a small readership, nurtured and mostly housed in universities, to wider cultural milieu. But he says that this change is also accompanied by changes in poetry itself: poetry's method of "publication" is widening from books to oral performance, not only in the literary sense of the poetry reading, but also in such modes as rap music, cowboy poetry, "spoken word"/performance art poetry, the resurgence of rhyme and meter, and so on. These alternative poetic genres are not replacing or supplanting literary poetry published in book format, but they are changing the entire cultural context of poetry.
Gioia's perspective about these changes is optimistic. His optimism stands in sharp contrast to the tone of Can Poetry Matter?, in which he argued that poetry existed mainly in an academic subculture, mostly cut off from the larger culture. I believe that Can Poetry Matter played no small part in helping to bring about the cultural changes that it adovcated, and which are surveyed in Disappearing Ink; the previous book ignited a major cultural conversation among poets about where poetry should reside culturally. Of course, most of the developments--such as rap music and performance poetry--noted in Disappearing Ink occurred independently of Gioia's work, but he has certainly played a major role in observing these developments and placing them in a larger historical perspective.
There are many other pleasures in Disappearing Ink, including essays on Weldon Kees, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Elizabeth Bishop--Gioia is a smart and lucid reader of other poets--but his cultural criticism is the most challenging portion of the book.
I must admit that I have been tremendously influenced by Gioia's ideas about the place of poetry, and more generally art, in American culture. Gioia's elevation to the chairmanship of the NEA provides him with a rare opportunity to put his ideas into practice on a large scale; I cannot think of a better choice to lead the NEA. In my own case, co-founding a poetry press that depends on author readings--the oral, performative art of poetry--as its main marketing vehicle, and which operates without the subsidy provided by contest reading fees (as is typical of poetry in the academic culture)--is a small contribution to expanding poetry's place in American culture.
Even if you do not agree with Gioia--and many poets do not--his ideas are hard to ignore, and for that reason alone I recommend Disappearing Ink to anyone interested in contemporary poetry--even if you are not a Gioia fan, as I am.