An interesting argument comes higher up in the same Newsweek article [emphasis mine]:
Poetry, for all its merits, has no program or volume to rival the current popularity of Oprah and Harry Potter, but even so, the decline of its already modest following is noteworthy. Some critics and readers claim that most poetry today is too cloistered and inaccessible, or that it is just plain bad. Yet a telephone survey conducted in 2005 by the National Opinion Research Center on behalf of the Poetry Foundation found that only 2 percent of respondents said they didn't read poetry because it was "too hard." And Donald Hall, a former U.S. poet laureate, points out that most poetry in any age is bad, and that hasn't kept people from reading in the past.
I wonder if Mr. Hall takes into account that the "badness" may not be quantitatively different, but it may be qualitatively different. I've noticed that people can wade through a surprising amount of bad to mediocre poetry in order to find the real gems, so long as the bad to mediocre stuff still resembles something a sane human being would write. It can be argued -- successfully, I think -- that there is nothing sane about the philosophies being expressed by much of poetry, and indeed by much of any art form whatever, in these latter days. This isn't a matter of difficulty; there's nothing difficult at the core about certain kinds of music (for example) which a good number of people still find instinctively offensive. The same tension works in poetry, surely.
Exposure to poetry (next paragraph in Newsweek) is probably a relevant factor (IMO). If (as was said in another Newsweek article, if memory serves) twenty years in popular music today is like a millennium once was, imagine the effect of "future shock" on one's potential to appreciate English literature in its many historical changes.
And then there are these paragraphs, to which Denny has already alluded:
Even if readership is down, not everyone is concerned. In fact, popularity is itself a fraught subject in the poetry community. In an address to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs this February, the president of the Poetry Foundation, John Barr, described how the 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.
A few years after the launch of National Poetry Month, poet Charles Bernstein wrote in a caustic essay that April is now when "poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration." He added that "National Poetry Month is about making poetry safe for readers by promoting examples of the art form at its most bland and its most morally 'positive'."
While I certainly empathize as a writer with the problems inherent in public exposure of private feelings, the ensemble is the risk that every artist worthy of the name takes. Perhaps good old Jungian psychology is partly at work here. Temperamental Catalysts or NFs -- by far the most likely to write and appreciate poetry overall (they were not disproportionately the shamans, priests and psalmists of antiquity, by and large, for nothing) -- are the very ones whose feelings are most likely to be hurt by rejection by their audiences. After that there are the SFs, especially the ISFP "Artists" and ESFP "Performers". Perhaps more NTs and STs are trying these days to write poetry and to teach it, not making the fundamental mental connections that come to Fs naturally. I believe that one can get around this, that if one finds out how one writes best then one can succeed in that niche (poetry based on mathematical and scientific ideas, or on particular brands of humor, may fall in this category).
But there is something deeper going on, and the last paragraph cited from Newsweek touches upon it. I submit that poetry cannot be both bland and "morally positive", no more than it can be both a mere primal scream and "morally positive". Such thinking stems from a misunderstanding of what moral positivism is. This likely wasn't a mistake commonly made when the King James Bible was the gold standard both for dignity and vigor in poetry and prose alike (and throughout the gamut of proper human emotion) and for public and private morality. It would be interesting and valuable to do a study on the subject, in order to test this hypothesis: one worthy of a Ph.D. thesis at least, in my opinion.
I believe there is something else fundamentally wrong with the thinking expressed in the last two paragraphs in Newsweek. When poets forget that the primary purpose of poetry is to communicate, then poetry inevitably will become needlessly complex and fragmented, needlessly ingrown and inbred, needlessly subject to the egos of the poet and his peers, and needlessly subject to the aid of specialist interpretation. "Public penetration" isn't the issue per se. Some of the best communicators among poets in history were among the most unpopular; people had the annoying habit of sawing them in two, or stoning them, or hanging them on crosses, and such like. Yet their works lived on long, long after their most severe critics perished, and have a deep penetration into the public even in this secular age.
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