Ralph Windle RW

Dana Gioia is one of the greatest poets of his generation, distinguished translator and librettist, and astute contributor to the national Arts  scene in the United States, through his two terms as Chairman of the Federal Endowment for the Arts. One great legacy is the lively revival of poetry-speaking in US schools. He is no stranger to the UK poetry scene.

We met through the pages of Fortune magazine, when I found myself the British outsider among a small group of so-called ‘Business Poets’ then writing in the US where Dana had managed to combine the Vice Presidency ( Marketing ) of a General Foods product, with the publication ( 1986  Graywolf Press ) of his first collection ‘ Daily Horoscope’, with a second ( 1991 Peterloo Poets ) ‘ The Gods of Winter ‘, on the way.

He was soon to be free of his professional business life, but a heartening exemplar as I struggled with mine . He remains impressively modest about his growing creative achievements and open-minded about the various paths poetry could take. He entered with great enthusiasm into the concept and fruition  of my ‘The Poetry of Business Life’  anthology and was generous about the inclusion of some of his own poems

Here is a typical example of his unusual and generous insights in a letter to me in 1991.

Dear Ralph,                    11/22/91

    I was very interested by your letter and articles. Most interesting of all was your statement that you had chosen business people not only as your subject matter but also as your audience. That isn’t only unique; it is newsworthy. Knowing one’s audience that well must be artistically liberating. You know exactly what references they will get and which you have to explain. That seems to me the central problem for the poet today – knowing how much he can condense his language, how referential he can be, what his audience will understand implicitly. The whole culture has become so fragmented and so debased that poetry often works like a remedial text. Poetry needs to move sideways to work best, but one can’t do that without knowing the audience will follow.

I gave a lecture last week at the Wharton School of Business …Afterwards I had lunch with the translator/poet/critic David Slavitt – a man who has made most of his career outside academia but recently joined Penn’s English Department. He pointed out to me that the smarter students were at business school not in the English department. I fear he may be right. In any event, there are a great many very smart people in business. It would be tragic to think that they are lost of high culture. Surely they need art as much as anyone. There must be a better way of reaching them. I’m delighted to see you rising to the challenge.

I hope you will include some prose in your anthology. Even a few paragraphs here and there might help the unfamiliar reader get his or her bearings. Feel free to excerpt anything you want from any of my essays which serve your purposes ….

All the best.

Dana.