Happy Thanksgiving

Dana Gioia trussed, roasted, and carved:

According to the preface to ''Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture,'' his new collection of essays and reviews, this means that he is ''particularly attuned to expressive intensity, lyric immediacy, significant detail and structural compression.'' It is good of him to tell us so at the outset, since these particular attunements are not much in evidence in the 20 prose selections that follow....

Although he has asked ''Can Poetry Matter?'' the only question Gioia has ever had on his mind is ''How Can Dana Gioia Matter?'' Everyone clutches the question in his or her 4am heart. But not everyone answers it with a sharp elbow in our neighbor's ribs.

Neo-formalism be damned! On to the traces of the infinite Library.