The idea of the canon is, of course, the sort of meritocratic model that hides a monopolistic one; despite Eliot's eloquent assertion that "[t]he existing order is complete before the new work arrives; [and that] for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered," in fact the existing order is never complete, but is instead a competing group of descriptions of value that jockey for supremacy by insisting that their own particular form of order is the most objective, or the most realistic, or even the least orderly. This situation does not absolve us of the need for critical standards, of course, but rather requires us to situate our standards within the rhetorical context of the poem examined, and then maintain an unflinching severity of judgment. Whenever someone begins to complain that critical standards have gone by the wayside, or else that any notion of critical standards is hopelessly arbitrary, rest assured that what they mean is: I believe my ideology, and the set of aesthetic principles flowing from it, is being threatened. This returns us to the final difficulty identified with the Rational Choice model and its application to contemporary poetry: privatization tend to isolate the underclass from access to the decision making process already co-opted by a set of elites, and encourages their passivity by granting them role in a predetermined, rationally verifiable order. In such a model, dialogue consists of individual poets composing descriptions of the self they then submit for approval to the elite class, descriptions that take the shape of poems meant to flatter those elites into allowing another to join them at the table. Poems not based on this model, such as those whose central goal is poetically crafted dialogue with the greater world of which the isolated world of the contemporary poet is but a part, stand little chance of getting on in either realm, as the former cares nothing about such dialogue and the latter distrusts it as too worldly, not concerned enough with perpetuating one of the existent aesthetic models.

It is important to reiterate that none of our current modes of poetic composition are, in and of themselves, worthless; they are tools, and the critical poet should be well-versed in all of them, ready to call attention to the value and use of both the rime royale and the celebratory work of identity politics. This may, in fact, be the point at which the economic metaphor fully collapses, if it has not done so already: one cannot adequately reduce the world of contemporary poetry to a system of self-interested exchanges because our methods for determining the value of a poem are entirely too complex and variable to allow such reduction. The benefit of asserting the validity of one system or the other may be perpetuation of your own aesthetic agenda, but at what cost? Well, at the cost of further isolating contemporary poetry from the greater culture. Readers familiar with Dana Gioia's 1991 essay, "Can Poetry Matter?" will recognize that we identify a similar, as yet unsolved, problem--the isolation of poetry from a larger audience--but our explanations for the cause of this situation, as well as possible remedies, are very different. Mr. Gioia believes, rightly so, that the subsidization of poets via MFA programs has further isolated them from the greater culture, but his complaint that "[t]he unprecedented fragmentation of American high culture during the past half century has left most arts in isolation from one another as well as from the general audience" goes largely unexamined, other than to claim collaborative high art performances will help resuscitate poetry. Indeed, people do die each day for want of what is found in poetry, but suggesting that their inability to recognize the nature of their want lies in the failure of poets, composers and painters to collaborate in multimedia extravaganzas strikes me as a bit naive. We live in a culture of distraction, and it is to the benefit of the status quo that all forms of artistic dialogue remain focused on assertions of their own beauty or well-heeled polemics to the faithful, rather than engaging the shared problems of our culture, such as the rigid determinism of the economic model that now dominates our values and our language. Mr. Gioia's other recommendations in "Can Poetry Matter?" are sound: poets should be encouraged to read the works of other poets they admire during readings; they should write far more critical, as opposed to nepotistic, prose about poetry, and the medium of radio could be better utilized in expanding poetry's audience. The internet, of course, has also proven extremely useful in furthering poetry's audience, but the limits of such expansion will be narrow indeed unless poets begin to write poems that engage in conversation with the world outside poetry. Mr. Gioia's prescription that poets compiling anthologies should be "scrupulously honest in including only poems they genuinely admire,” however, is contradictory in a way common to arguments for privatization, in that he puts the onus of ethical conduct on the individual, rather than on regulatory apparatus, even though such conduct consistently conflicts with personal self-interest. While Mr. Gioia never calls for the eradication of MFA programs in “Can Poetry Matter?", a significant portion of his agenda involves reducing their influence; in the essay "Business and Poetry," for example, he champions the model of the businessman-poet, the individual who writes purely for the love poetry rather than to further his career, as those poets teaching in MFA programs must; this is another standard rhetorical maneuver of free-market advocates, presenting the diligent CEO as an innocent mover of currency, childlike in his desire to fulfill the dictates of the marketplace, in contrast with the backbiting, careerist intellectual draping veils of elitist jargon over the eyes of a trusting public. This does in fact describe the character of a great deal of academic discourse, but also of the discourse of the marketplace, despite its pretensions to 'realistic' analysis. Anyone claiming that the intellectual climate of the university is somehow no more stimulating than that of the ordinary workplace is either lying, delusional, or has had an extraordinarily privileged career at the upper-echelon of business--exactly the sort of person likely to champion privatization, in other words.

To Mr. Gioia's recommendation that editors police themselves, then, I would like to add a few prescriptions of my own, ideas based on the notion that as poets and readers of poetry we have access to a form of regulatory apparatus: our critical voices. Rather than allowing the careerist system currently dominating contemporary poetry to persist untempered, we can voice our discomfort with the situation and help to reveal that the ‘invisible hand’ guiding poetic discourse is really a withered fist. Characterizing cultural expression as regulatory apparatus only works if we work diligently to prevent our qualitative and ideological preferences from fusing, of course, but by emphasizing critical self-inquiry, formal excellence, and the need to widen the audience for contemporary poetry, we can help encourage creativity and innovation, and eventually the view that the long-term health of the poetic environment is more important than the short-term goals of self-interested individuals.