Dana Gioia’s 'Meet Me at the Lighthouse'

Where imperatives about writing tend to generalize accomplishment, erase nuance for the sake of homogenizing the here and now, Dana Gioia’s writing exists in the world of a polemical should: a poem should be written in a particular manner, and criticism about poetry should or should not adopt a style particular to these shoulds. The lingering question that Gioia first posed in Can Poetry Matter? (1992)—which, according to the marketing materials on his website, “is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture”—does not ask, really, whether American poetry needs to be revived: “But why should anyone but a poet care about the problems of American poetry?”