Newsweek ran a piece not long ago about a the results of a report from The National Endowment for the Arts that was a mix of good news and bad news about American reading habits; people were reading more , with increases in fiction and non fiction alike, but we were, collectively , reading less poetry. The article takes the usual dooming sensationalist slant with the article's title, The End of Verse?People love to read about funerals, I guess, or the cultural echo of re-runs have truly colonized our attention spans. This is the same used car with a new coat of paint.

There is a long history of poets and critics declaring poetry is something completely other than prose, a separate art approximating a form of meta-writing that penetrates the circumscribed certainties of words and makes them work harder, in service to imagination, to reveal the ambiguity that is at the center of a literate population's perception. An elitist art, in other words, that by the sort of linguistic magic the poet generates sharpens the reader's wits; it would be interesting if someone conducted a study of the spread of manifestos , from competing schools of writing, left and right, over the last couple hundred of years and see if there is connecting insistence at the heart of the respective arguments .

What they'd find among other things, I think, is a general wish to liberate the slumbering population from the doldrums of generic narrative formulation and bring them to a higher, sharper, more crystalline understanding of the elusive quality of Truth; part of what makes poetry interesting is not just the actual verse interesting (and less interesting ) poets produce, but also their rationale as to why they concern themselves with making words do oddly rhythmic things. Each poet who is any good and each poet who is miserable as an artists remains, by nature, didactic ,chatty, and narcissistic to the degree that , as a species , they are convinced that their ability to turn a memorable ( or at least striking phrase) is a key with which others may unlock Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The lecturing component is only as interesting as good as the individual writer can be--not all word slingers have equal access to solid ideas or an intriguing grasp on innovative language--but the majority of readers don't want to be edified. They prefer entertainment to enlightenment six and half days out of the week, devouring Oprah book club recommendations at an even clip; the impulse with book buyers is distraction, a diversion from the noise of he world. Poetry, even the clearest and most conventional of verse , is seen as only putting one deeper into the insoluble tangle of experience. Not that it's a bad thing, by default, to be distracted, as I love my super hero movies and shoot 'em ups rather than movies with subtitles, and I don't think it's an awful thing for poetry to have a small audience. In fact, I wouldn't mind at all if all the money spent on trying to expand the audience were spent on more modest presentations. The audience is small, so what has changed?

Not to mention effet (sic) snobbery “in real gardens”.

And Ted, super hero movies and shoot 'em ups (and I love them as well) sometimes are also movies with subtitles; which I enjoy better than a good dubbing.

By the way, ever since Paul Breslin appeared in Narrative, I’ve been reading it, more on than off. There are a couple of excellent poems today by this guy. I wonder how poetry is doing in the balance of the world.

Time and again - study after study - survey after survey - has clearly demonstrated that, among the public at large, poetry is dying. I have tried to point this out on numerous occasions - to be shouted down by the "fraternity of poets" as nonsense. Yet, the trend over the last 70+ years is unmistakable as clearly spelled out by the NEA Report.

Poets themselves have abandoned the public. It is as if they have formed their own clique - a closely knit sub-society of writers - which seems to hold the general public in distain. They have adopted an elitist attitude which seems to say that if the general public doesn't read, understand and appreciate the poetry of today, then it must be the fault of the public, rather than the poet.

In an analogous manner, it would be like General Motors trying to claim that the reason that the public won't buy their cars is somehow the fault of the car-buying public. Following such an attitude, GM would quickly go bankrupt. And, essentially, that is what is happening to a significant portion of modern poetry.

d;-)

Had to Delete and repost my input after I noted the glaring typo in the subject line, so my orignal post now appears after yours - just in case anyone wonders why you addressed T and D when it appears you are the first to respond.

The word you were looking for was "Effete" snobbery. But I'm not sure effete is really the word I would use - at least not it's commonly inferred meaning of "feminine, somewhat soft and delicate as if from a pampered existence" However, there are other meanings to the word, less commonly used that actually come close to my own perception of what the "poetry elitists" have done to the form - "Having lost it character, vitality and strength; Marked by weakness and decadence".

The Newsweek article, toward the end, makes an observation which also strikes a resonant chord with me.

" .. .popular poet writing for the common reader essentially disappeared with the advent of Modernism. The 19th-century model of poets publishing in mainstream venues such as newspapers was replaced by the 20th-century model, in which the increasing fragmentation and difficulty of poetry required specialists to discern it, moving it into the college classroom. Today, to call a poem "accessible" is practically an insult, and promotional events like National Poetry Month are derided by many poetry diehards as the reduction of a complex and often deeply private art form to a public spectacle."

Personally, I think more emphasis needs to be placed on engendering a love and appreciation for poetry among the young. Too often I find that students, by the time they enter High School, are already "turned off" to poetry. I think that is due, in part, to poor teaching methods, and a tendency to emphacize poetry to which they can not relate, while being able to recite, verbatim, the lyrics to the latest pop music hit.

The future of poetry rests with the young - and those who teach them.

d;-)

Effet is the word, imaginary effets I think. (It is a common newt, also known as an asker.)

Ef´fet - n.1. (Zool) the common newt - called also asker, eft and ewt.

Actually - I also like the definition fo Effete as applied to modern poetry - especially the second definition - "Having lost it character, vitality and strength; Marked by weakness and decadence".

Or, you could have been agreeing with me - en effet (French) - "indeed".

d;-)

En effet! And, it is embarrassing how little French I have retained, thank the internet gods for the translators.

LOVE those language translators.

In truth, I am seriously concerned that Poetry as a "public art form" is quickly dying. Readership of poetry has declined by more than 50% in my lifetime, and current efforts, like National Poetry Month, seem to be having little to no effect in reversing that tide. Modern Poetry has become a "dead language", not unlike ancient Greek or Latin - practiced only in the cloistered halls of Academia by "purists" and "cultural elitists" who claim sole dominion over what they consider "proper poetry" in this post-Modernist era.

I actually applaud those like MaryAnn who actively try to bring the appreciation of poetry to a wider audience and Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state share their favorite poems. But I think far more needs to be done. I think it is time for EVERYONE who loves poetry to make an active effort within their community to promote the love of poetry in whatever way they can - especially among the young.

QED

d;-)

HAP, how nice to read that you enjoyed some poems by Darwish in Narrative Magazine.

As that Wikipedia article probably said (I confess I didn't read it) he died just last year and was a leading poet of the Palestinian experience as well as of modern Arabic poetry in general.

I urge you to buy his last book which, as I remember, contains much of his life's work.

(And, I just learned recently, his last name is pronounced dar - WEESH.)

MA

Hi MA, the poems in Narrative today were excellent. The second poem actually took my breath away; I don’t know why, but it did. I don’t know about buying the book, in all honesty, I mostly read - believe it or not – to write about stuff.

children aren't really learning how to read. Sure, they can memorize the words...or even sound them out...but they're not learning nuance, subtext, etc, etc.

The crap young adults are reading...god. It's all Howard, Grisham, Roberts, Ludlum...templates of the same plots used and reused.

I think of the new 'fiction' in the bestseller section like I do the [cough] music of Spears and Timberlake...

I mean, at least Oprah's storytellers were a step up from Tom Clancy...

Pardon my fun with this redundant tautology (heh) ... Until children are taught to read (carefully), they won't be able to appreciate reading.

And now with more visual distractions, and Rovian assholes whose agendas depend on voters unable to read critically....that seems less and less likely.

You point up one of the very reasons WHY poetry for the general public is a dying art - we always want to find someone else to balme. It's Rove and Bush's fault - adults read too much "pop" fiction - the music of Spears and Timberlake - the public isn't smart enough to understand . . .

The only one responsible - and the only one who can reverse the trend is the one that you see in the mirror every morning. Until each and every one of us does something positive to promote poetry - like MaryAnn does - then it is doomed.

It is up to each of us to strike just one match - reignite the fire - relight the wick of the candle of appreciation for poetry.

QED

d;-)

Plagiarism will not "relight the wick of the candle of appreciation for poetry."

And so the comments of a plagiarist carry no weight whatsoever.

Time and time again, in the forty five years since I started writing poems, survey after survey has declared that "poetry is dying" . Every article I read on the impending doom of the form had numbers and stats to back it the claim, and after all these years, after all the doomsday forcasting, it's really about time for us to get honest and admit that it's a slow news day riff that editors will use to fill up a newshole. Theatre is dying, movies are dying, painting is dying, classical music is dying, jazz is dying, the novel is dying, every art form is dying , we've been told, and yet here we are, still reading it, buying it, writing it, discussing it with passion. Going along with the notion that "poetry is dying" is merely following the herd. The audience for poetry is small, it has always been small, and small it is likely to remain. The mistake is to look at the relatively small audience it has and think that is evidence of waning activity or vitality. Far from it. I think it's time for us to stop playing this shrill riff. There are better tunes to sing, and new ones to write.

And if you read the NEA study - the data supports that contention. In just the last 16 years the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half and now stands at a miserable 8.3 percent of adults.

"yet here we are, still reading it, buying it, writing it, discussing it with passion".

But that WE is becoming a dying breed. To pass the evidence off as some sort of "slow news day riff that editors will use to fill up a newshole" is to continue to stick our collective heads in the sand - secure and content on our little island, as the sea of apathy continues to eat away at the shore.

QED

d;-)