Dana Gioia

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Gioia joined General Foods in 1977, where he eventually became vice president of marketing. He was on the team that invented Jell-O Jigglers and is credited with helping reverse a long-running sales decline for Jello. While working at General Foods, Gioia wrote in the evenings, producing several volumes of poetry and literary translations. In an interview with William Baer, Gioia recalled that he chose, while working at General Foods, to conceal his simultaneous authorship of both poetry and literary criticism. He explained, "I felt it wouldn't do me any good in the business world to be known as a poet."

In 1984, Gioia was called by Esquire Magazine and told that he would be included in their inaugural list of Men and Women Under 40 Who are Changing the Nation. Gioia recalls, "When Esquire called to say that they were planning to write an article about me, I tried to discourage them. But they made clear that my own wishes had nothing to do with it since they intended to run the article anyway. Most people at General Foods were pretty shocked, especially my boss, who was an Annapolis graduate who'd been an all-American in two sports and a commanding officer in combat... So when he heard the rumor that I wrote poetry, he called me into his office, and he asked me if it was true. When I reluctantly conceded that it was, his only response was, 'Shit.' ... By that time, I was already recognized as a valuable senior executive at General Foods, but I have to admit that being known as a poet didn't make my life any easier."

At the same time that Esquire ran the article, a dispute was beginning to erupt in American poetry between free verse poets and those, like Gioia, who also wrote and published in traditional verse forms. Over time, the dispute would be dubbed The Poetry Wars by literary critics.

When The Poetry Wars began, poets who wrote free verse and Confessional poetry were stereotyped as socially progressive, anti-racist, and as New Left socialists. New Formalist and New Narrative poets were stereotyped as old money White Anglo-Saxon Protestant preppies and as Anglophiles filled with hatred of the American Revolution and nostalgia for the British Empire. American poetry in traditional verse forms was, according to poets and critics who believed in "The Free Verse Revolution", reactionary, Eurocentric, un-American, white supremacist, and even fascist.

In a 2016 interview, Gioia recalled, "As soon as I began publishing formal poems, my work was attacked." In response, he decided, "to articulate my poetics", by publishing literary essays.

Gioia wrote the 1983 essay Business and Poetry, in which he pointed out how many other well-known figures in American poetry, including Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, had also made their livings outside of the academy.

Gioia agrees with the New Formalist poets', who believe that American poetry needs to return to rhyme, regular rhythm, more traditional practices of literary translation, and with the New Narrative poets' rejection of Confessional poetry in favor of telling non-autobiographical stories. Otherwise, Gioia has argued since the early 1980s, American poetry will never again regain the popularity currently held by fiction writing. Like many other poets, however, Gioia writes in both free and formal verse and is a particular proponent of accentual verse.

In a 2021 interview, Gioia said that while New Formalism and the New Narrative are by far the most controversial responses within American poetry to the dominant position of free verse and confessional poetry, they are only one facet of an enormous grassroots movement. According to Gioia, "If I go back to 1975 when I was leaving Harvard, I was told by the world experts in poetry that rhyme and meter were dead, narrative was dead in poetry. Poetry would become ever more complex, which meant that it could only appeal to an elite audience, and finally, that the African American voice in poetry rejected these European things and would take this experimental form. What the intellectuals in the United States did was we took poetry away from common people. We took rhyme away, we took narrative away, we took the ballad away, and the common people reinvented it. The greatest one of these was Kool Herc in the South Bronx, who invented what we now think of as rap and hip hop. Within about ten years, it went from non-existent to being the most widely purchased form of popular music. We saw in our own lifetime something akin to Homer, the reinvention of popular oral poetry. There were parallels in the revival of slam poetry, cowboy poetry, and new formalism, so at every little social group, people from the ground up reinvented poetry because the intellectuals had taken it away from them."

The term New Formalism was first used in Ariel Dawson's article The Yuppie Poet in the May 1985 issue of the AWP Newsletter, which was an attack against the growing trend of returning to traditional verse forms.

According to Gerry Cambridge, "Dawson's polemic conflated the increasing prevalence of Formalism with lifestyle, with 'the glorification of competitiveness and the compulsion to acquire,' possessed, she asserted, by 'the yuppie poet.' She also accused New Formalism simply of being old Formalism, as practiced by Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur, rehashed. Bizarrely, she opposed a concern with technique against 'artistic integrity.' Apparently, she judged them to be enemies of each other rather than complimentary."

In 1986, Diane Wakoski, a poet, literary critic, and professor at Michigan State University, published the essay "The New Conservatism in American Poetry". The essay was provoked when Wakoski attended a Modern Language Association conference in which old Formalist John Hollander spoke critically, according to Robert McPhillips, of college and university, "creative writing programs and the general slackness of most free verse."

In what Gerry Cambridge has called, "a rambling and confused attack," Wakoski said of Hollander's remarks, "I thought that I heard the Devil speaking to me." Hollander was, Wakoski alleged, "a man full of spite, from lack of recognition and thinly disguised anger... who was frustrated and petty from that frustration," as he was, "denouncing the free verse revolution, denouncing the poetry which is the fulfillment of the Whitman heritage, making defensive jokes about the ill-educated, slovenly writers of poetry who have been teaching college poetry classes for the past decade, allowing their students to write drivel and go out into the world, illiterate of poetry." Wakoski then turned her attack against the younger poets, whom she called, "really the spokesmen for the new conservatism," which she called an unfortunate continuation of the legacies of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost.

According to Robert McPhillips, "Wakoski's critique of these poets is less aesthetic than it is political. She actually believes that those who use traditional forms could only be supporters of Reagan's conservative agenda. But her overtly moral denunciation and generalized invective marked a turning point in contemporary poetics. Her excesses created a backlash from writers and critics who were more disinterested in their reading of the poets Wakoski so zealously condemned. As a result of the public controversy, some poets began to see themselves as part of the loose movement that would be identified as the New Formalism."

Accord to Gerry Cambridge, "This attack generated five responses, from Robert Mezey, Lewis Turco, David Radavich, Brian Richards, and Dana Gioia. Most of them denied any necessary link between aesthetic and politics, in particular between form and conservatism, citing Ezra Pound as an example of a Fascist who wrote free verse. They also criticized as a kind of cultural fascism Wakoski's intolerance of literary pluralism, paradoxically in the guise of a democratic Whitmanism that declared form to be un-American. Gioia compared her tone and content to 'the quest for pure Germanic culture led by the late Joseph Goebbels.' He entertainingly suggested 'the radical notion' that whatever poetry was written by Americans constituted American poetry. Wakoski's polemic and these responses were the first public controversy about the young movement."

In 1986, Robert McPhillips witnessed a debate between Gioia and John Hollander over, "whether poetry was initially an oral or a written art." Gioia argued that poetry was originally oral, while Hollander argued that it was originally written.

McPhillips later recalled, "In retrospect, I realize that I heard on that occasion part of what was to become a tenet of the New Formalism often articulated by Gioia: that poetry was first and foremost an oral form and rhyme and meter central elements of oral poetry; that these virtues were considered outmoded by a generation of free verse poets; and that these were poetic virtues that – along with narrative – Gioia and others of his generation saw as vital elements necessary to be restored to poetry if it hoped to reestablish something like the mainstream audience still enjoyed by serious writers of fiction like Oates, John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Jane Smiley."

In his influential 1987 essay Notes on the New Formalism, Gioia wrote: "Literature not only changes; it must change to keep its force and vitality. There will always be groups advocating new types of poetry, some of it genuine, just as there will always be conservative opposing forces trying to maintain the conventional methods. But the revival of rhyme and meter among some young poets creates an unprecedented situation in American poetry. The New Formalists put the free-verse poets in the ironic and unprepared position of being the status quo. Free verse, the creation of an older literary revolution, is now the long-established, ruling orthodoxy, formal poetry the unexpected challenge... Form, we are told authoritatively, is artificial, elitist, retrogressive, right-wing, and (my favorite) Un-American. None of these arguments can withstand critical scrutiny, but nevertheless, they continue to be made so regularly that one can only assume that they provide some emotional comfort to their advocates. Obviously, for many writers the discussion between formal and free-verse has become an encoded political debate."

Despite persuasive arguments against political stereotyping of formalist poets by Progressive poet-critics Paul Lake in the 1988 essay, Towards a Liberal Poetics, Annie Finch in the anthologies A Formal Feeling Comes (1994), which states in the introduction, ""Readers who have been following the discussion of the 'New Formalism' over the last decade may not expect to find such a diversity of writers . . . the poems collected here contradict the popular assumption that formal poetics correspond to reactionary politics and elitist aesthetics," and After New Formalism (1999), and A. E. Stallings in the 2010 essay Afro-Formalism, "The Poetry Wars" between poets and critics from both literary movements are still raging decades later in literary journals, in colleges and universities, and on the internet. Furthermore, Diane Wakoski's claims continue to be repeated.

In a 2016 interview with John Cusatis, however, Dana Gioia explained, "Literary movements are always temporary. They last a decade or so, and then they die or merge into the mainstream. The best New Formalist poets gradually became mainstream figures. There was no climax to the so-called Poetry Wars, only slow assimilation and change. Free and formal verse gradually ceased to be considered polar opposites. Form became one of the available styles of contemporary practice. Today one finds poems in rhyme and meter in most literary magazines. New Formalism became so successful that it no longer needed to exist."

In 1991, Gioia published the influential essay, Can Poetry Matter? in the April issue of Atlantic Monthly. In the essay, Gioia began with the words, "American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class, poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists, they are almost invisible."

The reason, Gioia explained, was that between 1940s and the 1969s, when college and university faculty positions were routinely offered to famous poets, American poetry had become imprisoned in college and university creative writing programs. As a result, recent poetry was no longer being read or studied by the vast majority of the American people. He alleged that, to say that a living poet was well-known, meant merely that he or she was well known to other poets, who were generally professors and graduate students. He further wrote that poetry was no longer a fruit of Literary Bohemia, but of academic bureaucracy.

Gioia concluded with the words, "The history of art tells the same story over and over. As art forms develop, they establish forms that guide creation, performance, instruction, and analysis. But, eventually, these conventions grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience. Although much wonderful poetry is being written, the American poetry establishment is locked into a series of outmoded conventions – outmoded ways of presenting, dissecting, and teaching poetry. Educational institutions have codified them into a stifling bureaucratic etiquette that enervates the art. These conventions may once have made sense, but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto. It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society has already told us that poetry is dead. Let's build a funeral pyre out of the desiccated conventions piled around us and watch the unkillable Phoenix rise from the ashes."

Writing in 2002, Gioia recalled, "When the original essay appeared in the April 1991 issue of Atlantic Monthly, the editors warned me to expect angry letters from interested parties. When the hate mail arrived typed on the letterheads of University writing programs, no one was surprised. What astonished the Atlantic editors, however, was the sheer size and intensity of the response. Can Poetry Matter? eventually generated more mail than any article the Atlantic had published in decades. The letters arrived in three familiar varieties – favorable, unfavorable, and incomprehensible. What was unusual was that they were overwhelmingly positive. Hundreds of people wrote – often at great length – to express their agreement, frequently adding that the article had not gone far enough in criticizing certain trends on contemporary poetry. The responses came from a great cross section of readers – teachers, soldiers, lawyers, librarians, nuns, diplomats, housewives, business executives, ranchers, and reporters – mostly people who were not then normally heard in the poetry world. As their testimonies demonstrated, they cared passionately for the art but felt isolated and disenfranchised from the official academic culture of poetry. An outsider myself, who worked in an office during the day and wrote at night, I felt a deep kinship with their situation. I probably learned more from those readers than they learned from me. Their comments provided clear and candid insight on the place poetry still occupied in the lives of many Americans. For me, the response to Can Poetry Matter? will always reside in those individual letters, which have never entirely stopped coming."

In 1992, Gioia resigned from his position as a vice president at General Foods to pursue a full-time career as a poet.

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