A couple of introductory comments. First, who knows, someday we may be sitting on Dune huffing spice with Thufir Hawat playing the lute and regaling us with his verse. I’m talking about the world as we know it. It would take big cultural changes for poetry to matter again.
Second, I’ve written a lot of poetry, and I think my stuff’s really good, and I’ve had to accept that, no matter how good it is, it will never have a cultural impact or be remembered over the long term. So I’m not pissing on someone else’s territory; I’m pissing on my own.
Way back in 1991, Dana Gioia wrote the devastating essay Can Poetry Matter? He later became Poet Laureate of the United States and walked some of his comments back, IIRC, but still, everything he said is just as true today, and since then we’ve had 24 more years of people not giving a shit about poetry added to the pile of not mattering.
I’m going to try to add to Dana’s already exhaustive explication of the causes of why we are where we are today with respect to poetry. In fact I’m going to go a bit more macro and say this: Society has shed several categories of fame and admiration since the end of WWII.
Most of these require caveats, but the overall pattern should be apparent: We don’t have famous composers any more (outside of movie composers, and we haven’t had a truly “major” composer since Shostakovitch). We don’t have authors that are both famous and seen as writing material that will last (I’m not sure any author, even if they are approved of by TPTB in literary circles, is seen as having lasting impact or fame along the lines of a Hemingway or Fitzgerald–no, not Franzen, either). We have rich, prominent artists like Damien Hirst, but we do not have anyone who is recognized as “great” by the culture, such as Picasso.
And we sure as hell don’t have any famous poets. I don’t even need a caveat on this one. Probably the last of that breed was Rod McKuen, who died recently. He is actually the best-selling poet in the history of the world, but he was trashed from the beginning by the intelligentsia, and his work has pretty much been forgotten.
Now you can pick at some of my points above, but let’s look at the big picture: Until sometime in the 1950s, you had giants of art that were recognized culture-wide as giants. Dali, Bernstein, Frost–the names just pop. We don’t have that today. The people that can expect to get fame and genuine respect as artists today are in popular music, film, and TV. We simply have lost our social mechanism, if you will, for creating famous people outside those categories.
I’d like to suggest some causes for why this is so, and why poetry has been hit even harder.
First, the causes of the general phenomenon:
• Technology changed. Visual entertainment like motion pictures and video games gave people experiences they preferred to others. There is only so much mindshare to go around, so other media lost out.
• The long tail phenomenon. People are enjoying more of everything, and the evolution of content distribution systems, especially the Internet, has allowed everyone to be in their own bubble of what they like. This greatly dilutes the potential for any one thing being “big.”
• The sharing of global content also reduces the demand for local content. You can get into your local band scene, or you can go on Spotify and listen to stuff from around the world. The death of the local newspaper means you don’t need local writers. The few can supply the many, worldwide. This in turn gives the wannabes the incentive to give away their content for free, creating further noise in the system and a great glut of supply.
• The rise of literacy and leisure time in the 20th century created an overabundance of artists of every stripe. Every Tom, Dick, and Harriet trying to be a novelist/poet/painter/singer/songwriter created a highly noisy system in which it is hard to get noticed, even if you are very good. Moreover, there is a human tendency to look down upon that which is abundant and respect that which is scarce. Although, for example, people still enjoy their popular novelists, the fact that someone can write well no longer accords respect.
• By the same token, film/TV/video games are expensive to create and have a natural scarcity factor. Only so many major motion pictures can be produced in a year, and thus those associated with these productions gain considerable prestige.
• But TV and popular music are in danger of falling victim to the same phenomenon. The No. 1 show in 2014, The Big Bang Theory, would have ranked No. 57 in 1994. I find that to be a mindblowing statistic. I don’t think I need to say much about the cratering of the music industry.
• Current content must compete with the content of the past. Kids don’t have to listen to new bands; they can listen to the Beatles and Stones, and they certainly do avail themselves of anything and everything. The same goes for any type of written content. Why read some dickhead’s chapbook when you probably won’t have enough time in your lifetime to go through Donne, Keats, Dickinson, et al.?
• The media simply lost the narrative of the “great artists” living and dead that we all need to respect. At the same time, individual media have lost a lot of their power. Being on Ed Sullivan or Oprah could make you as an artist. I’m not sure being on Ellen’s show can do the same thing these days (TV still retains a lot of power because of its scarcity, however).
The TL;DR version of the above is that the supply of art has vastly increased, while our ability to process it all has not, reducing the potential for any one person to be seen as “great.”
All of the above applies to poetry, but there are some additional points that work against it in particular:
• Poetry is the most difficult of artistic media to enjoy. It is language-specific and requires a high degree of literacy. It is harder even than literary fiction, on average, and the latter has suffered as well for this reason.
• Poetry is the least entertaining of artistic media. Poetry can be very interesting, intellectually and emotionally satisfying, and meaning; it can thus feel good in the mind, but aside from light, humorous verse, it is not entertaining per se. I would say that even recondite, abstract art is entertaining in a way that poetry is not.
• Thus, poetry was never all that popular to begin with. This requires a big caveat. Poets like Longfellow were basically writing novels in verse form that captured the public imagination. Evangeline was genuinely huge. But I don’t think the masses in the 19th century were so very much into poetry per se. Then again, there was a huge craving for content then (supply and demand were in the opposite relationship to what they are now), that a competent poet would have a chance of selling their work on some scale or another. Once you get into the 20th century and people had recorded music and movies, I think the status of poetry was always precarious, and it lasted as long as it did because of the legacy cultural narrative of the time, which the big media bought into.
• People now get their poetry fix from song lyrics and rap. Pretty simple. People do want poetic, meaningful words in their lives, but they get that from music now. This is probably the biggest factor of all, the ultimate killer of poetry.
Looking into the future as best as I can, I think 100 years from now the world of art will be even more diluted. We may very well not have popular music as we know it then. Poetry will be even more of a niche interest than it is now, like stamp or coin collecting.
By the way, I think it is insane that people go to MFA programs to study poetry and become better poets. Forgive me, but LULZ!
What do you think? Is there anything I’m missing?