![[Critical Mass]](/archives/cmlogo.gif)
![[dot]](/archives/cmdot.gif){kind=small}
June 1, 2007
![[feather]](/archives/feather.gif){kind=small}
The business of poetry
Knowledge@ Wharton has a very interesting interview with NEA chairman Dana Gioia, who describes himself as "the only person in history who went to business school to be a poet." Gioia, who was once vice president of General Foods, sings the praises of the business world--which requires a great deal of artistry--as well as the joys of being far removed from academia.
Knowledge@Wharton: As you have correctly pointed out, many poets have worked in business and there are also business people who write poetry. What does that tell us about the relationship between business and poetry?Gioia: Well there is the old quote that "The business of America is business." In America, overwhelmingly the most talented people in our society go into business. Now, I know people in our English departments don't like to believe that, but it's true. You meet people who are just fantastic, sharp and talented people in the business world. And they could have chosen any number of fields and succeeded in them. A lot of them come into business with another passion; it might be for music, it might be for literature -- it might even be for sports. And sometimes, very talented people can maintain those interests throughout their lives.
One of the interesting things about publishing Business and Poetry was that after I published it, no one had ever even noticed before this essay that there was a tradition of American businessmen who were poets. They always treated Wallace Stevens as this singular example and as I've just shown there were dozens of people like this.
The funny thing though was after I published this, I kept getting letters from dozens and dozens more. I think I had put a footnote, in one of the later editions with about 30 names; I could now give you another 50 or 60 beyond that. I think what a lot of business people enjoyed about reading that essay was that they were not alone - they were not "total weirdo's". And so, I think it really is a function that a lot of talented people go into business and they continue to do something else as well, whether it's playing the piano, collecting art, or writing poetry.
Knowledge@Wharton: You referred a couple of times to the fact that as you rise in business, imagination and creativity become assets. Extending that point further, what do you think poets and entrepreneurs have in common? Aren't entrepreneurs poets, but just working within a different medium?
Gioia: Well, if you take the word poet in the old Greek sense of "a maker", what entrepreneurs and artists have in common is that they imagine something that they then bring into reality. And, as any poet or any composer or any entrepreneur knows, you imagine something, but to bring it to reality you revise and recalibrate it a million times to get it just right. So, I think the ability of envisioning something and then bringing it into being goes back to the ancient meaning of the word poetry -- Poesis which means the made thing.
Academics tend to draw a sharp, polarizing line between their world and the world of business. One place where this is most blatant -- and most blatantly anti-intellectual -- is in discussions about why there aren't more conservatives in academia. The academic conventional wisdom tends to be that conservatives are greedy and selfish--and hence go into business over the lower-paying, implicitly more virtuous academic professions. They also like to argue that conservatives are not as intelligent as academics--as SUNY-Albany's Ron McClamrock once famously commented, "Lefties are overrepresented in academia because on average, we're just f-ing smarter." Implicit in these impoverished lines of thought, of course, are the assumptions that people in business are not creative, and that art is very far removed from the corporate world. People like Gioia throw a wrench in those tired arguments, and it's refreshing to see.
Trackback Pings:
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.erinoconnor.org/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1274
Comments:
Come on. Gioia is not a good example of a smart conservative. The man's poetry is on the whole a dull, unoriginal, uninventive body of work. Consider the tradition of deeply original poetics in America: Dickinson, Whitman, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Frost. Then look at Gioia's work. The man's a minor footnote to Frost. Gioia is devoid of ideas, rhythms, insights into language -- all the defining characteristics of a true poet. And his own attitudes toward America's art world, especially in his role as NEA chairman, are more one-sided and oppressive politically and aesthetically than anything going on in America's universities. It's rather hypocritical to hold Gioia up as evidence that academics are biased toward business, given Gioia anti-intellectual biases toward countless American artists.
Some interesting and contrarian thoughts by management consultant Michael Hammer on the appropriate education for future executives, here.
Consider the tradition of deeply original poetics in America: Dickinson, Whitman, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Frost.
Consider, too, that Ezra Pound was deeply interested in (if deeply misguided about) economics; T. S. Eliot spent eight years working at Lloyd's Bank, then became a director of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber); William Carlos Williams worked primarily as a doctor; and Wallace Stevens was a lawyer and businessman. Clearly, Gioia has a point.
Angus -- Pound also wrote entire Cantos about the sin of Usury.
But sure, Gioia has an obvious point: lots of writers had, and still have, day jobs. Kafka worked for an insurance company. Ron Silliman refuses still to take an academic job; he remains a market analyst.
Still, I wonder: if we look at all the day jobs, how many are in "business"? A bank clerk is not in business; Kafka, an insurance man, was also not in business. Eliot, as director of Faber, mainly read and chose manuscripts, and he did so without money interests. He chose to publish Wilson Harris, and Faber keeps Harris's work in print, despite the fact that it never sold much at all. Being a doctor is also not really being in business.
Gioia is trying to equate an executive's skills with a poet's. And sure, there's some overlap between any jobs. (There's a thin line between being Louis's pissboy and Augustus's poet.)
What Gioia doesn't admit is that there's a difference in academic jobs that many poets take. Today's lyric poets, who Silliman calls "The School of Quietude," tend to teach in creative writing programs. In contrast, many experimental poets tend to teach in literature programs, publishing real academic criticism as well as poetry. I see no problem the latter: a great poet *should* have insight into teaching poetry. Creative writing programs, though, tend to be personal fiefdoms of half-rate poets who insist that their students write exactly as they do.
