Friday, March 15, 2019

Splendid Sentences, Part 15: Dana Gioia on the State of Poetry

I remember wondering whether poetry can matter anymore when I came across Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" (The Atlantic, May 1991). The essay gave me a lot to think about, and it gained him considerable recognition. It places poetry in a purgatorial state within American culture and calls for concrete actions that arts program administrators, teachers, and poets can take to rescue poetry from the analysis paralysis of academics.

Before recommending those practical steps, Gioia writes this sentence: 
The most serious question for the future of American culture is whether the arts will continue to exist in isolation and decline into subsidized academic specialties or whether some possibility of rapprochement with the educated public remains. 
What makes this 37-word sentence so interesting is the imbalance of its two propositions:

  • The first proposition is 15 words, and the second is 10.
  • The first is structured in subject-verb order (arts + will continue), and the second suspends the subject (possibility) and verb (remains) between two prepositional phrases.
  • The first begins with a field (the arts), and second begins with a supposition (some possibility).
  • The first ends with a noun (specialties), and the second ends with a verb (remains).
I often urge writing students to seek balance, or parallelism, in their writing, but here Gioia aims for opposing, clashing models, so he uses an asymmetrical arrangement to achieve his desired effect.

Read previous installments of  "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE: