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...academic, the poet must publish or perish. This helps account for the explosion of small presses and journals "like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants." Gioia sees little quality control, little honest reviewing and thus great reason for the general reader to be turned off. Can Poetry Matter? reads as an expose of the literary scene. Gioia accuses poets of maintaining a virtual conspiracy of silence, of refusing to publish negative reviews. At one point, he even invokes the names of Woodward and Bernstein, the celebrated journalists that uncovered Watergate...
Right now, "poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms." Contemporary poets must find ways to reestablish a rapport with the public. Gioia suggests that poets work in narrative forms. He praises the exploration of traditional meter and form, the use of imagery culled from popular culture and "the restoration of direct unironic emotion"--all qualities of the New Formalist movement in poetry. Gioia characterises New Formalism as "the latest in ...[a] series of rebellions against poetry's cultural marginality." As a member of the New Formalist vanguard, Gioia himself rebels not only in poetry, but also...
...skills as a synthesizer, Kennedy primarily assesses and passes on received opinions. This often leaves him tentative just at the point when the impatient reader, perhaps unrealistically, demands certainty. Take Kennedy on climate change: "Little of this is clear at present, although once again most scientists guess that the effects of global warming will be deleterious rather than beneficial." Or his view of the fate of the former Soviet Union: "So severe and complex is the crisis that the only certain fact is the existence of innumerable uncertainties...
There is little in Preparing for the Twenty-First Century that will surprise a faithful reader of newspaper op-ed pages or a regular viewer of public- television chat shows. Yet once again Kennedy may resonate perfectly with the national psyche; his concern for the environment, education and the economy mirrors the visionary world view of the incoming Clinton Administration. Not a cheerleader by nature, Kennedy makes scant secret of his skepticism: "In the unlikely event that government and societies do decide to transform themselves, we ought to recognize that our endeavors might have only a marginal effect...
...public approval-to-disapproval rating. In fact, if it's a battered image Reiter is searching for, perhaps she would do well to begin with the badly-beaten, rejected Republican Party. But as for the reversal in immigration policy effected by the Administration, it is the opinion of this reader that it was a long overdue policy shift consistent with our national values and past immigration standards...