[New-Poetry] Gioia's Nightmare

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/post/index/1135/Gioias-Nightmare

Gioia's Nightmare
July 19, 2007, 8:48 am 
Posted by Robert P. Imbelli 

In today's Wall Street Journal, Dana Gioia reveals his nocturnal panic attack:


I have a recurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the "Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.


He worries about a culture that increasing wants to be entertained, rather than challenged in a way that only art can challenge. (The late Neil Postman warned about "amusing ourselves to death.")Yet Gioia suggests that culpability is not a one-sided affair:


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