Some of these 21st century poems are pretty good. All of them are very brief, as a sop to the digital age. The authors are all essentially unknown to me and probably anyone else who does not follow poetry professionally.
Dylan did win the Nobel. But the answer may be JK Rowling, depending on what you consider a poem.
…I just posted this in another thread, but “If I must die”, by Refaat Alareer.
As read by Bryan Cox.
Yeah, I was coming in here to post that. I think the 2011 “If I Must Die” is probably the most recent candidate for really widespread cultural recognition and intense impact, though it didn’t attain that level until the author’s death in 2023.
That’s very moving. But i hadn’t heard it before today.
Though Gorman’s piece from 2020 would could if people were still talking about it 2025. The fact it’s can’t actually remember anything about the poem itself, kind of rules it out.
Four of those six were set to music (even if the original music has since been lost).
Yeah, concur that it’s not up there with “Footprints”. I think it’s far and away the most real-world culturally impactful of 21st-century poems, though.
I would say that nowadays the traditional role of the poem as a shared cultural touchstone of perceptions, reactions to events, etc., has been largely usurped by the meme.
And which caused no small amount of disagreement in the poetry and literature world, where many people felt that song lyrics (which is what Dylan won the award for) are distinct from what is usually termed as “literature.” YMMV, of course, and yes, one can find definitions for the word “literature” which would appear to include song lyrics.
I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned “First They Came”.
If notoriety counts as cultural significance, Calvin Trillin’s “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” made quite a stir when the New Yorker published it in 2016:
Have they run out of provinces yet?
If they haven’t, we’ve reason to fret.
Long ago, there was just Cantonese.
(Long ago, we were easy to please.)
But then food from Szechuan came our way,
Making Cantonese strictly passé….
For a time in the 1970s, “Deteriorata” probably was the best-known poem in America.
It was a parody of a 1920s poem called “Desiderata”, rediscovered and made into a spoken-word record by Les Crane in 1971. The National Lampoon couldn’t resist mocking it, and put out a parody version by Tony Hendra on their Radio Dinner album and released it as a single. (Some instrumental noodling was in the background, but still a spoken-word piece.) It made the Billboard Hot 100. Posters with the words were in every third college dorm room, proving the parody caught the Nixon-era mood perfectly.
Consider that two wrongs never make a right, but that three do.
Strive at all times to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate.
Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls
Would scarcely get your feet wet.You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not,
The universe is laughing behind your back.
Always remember that Rod McKeun is the best selling poet in American history, according to some sources, with 60 million books sold.
I feel like some of Shel Silverstein’s works might be worth a mention, here. Certainly they’re widely-recognized, and even if a person might not be familiar with some particular poem of his, his style is always recognized.
Though again we run into the song issue, because the best-recognized ones are probably the ones that were later set to music: “Boa Constrictor”, “The Unicorn”, “A Boy Named Sue”.
I never heard on this controversy, and I have every humor book published by Trillin, including all four books of Deadline Poetry.
By 2016, Trillin had been writing satire for four decades. He also was the food writer for The New Yorker, a tireless champion of good food that wasn’t fancy food. He made Arthur Bryant’s bbq in Kansas City the most famous bbq restaurant in America. His oeuvre probably includes dozens of articles satirizing pompous foodies.
This context seems crucial to understanding the poem. I have to agree with the writer in your first link that the satire is glaringly obvious.
Talk about culturally significant, a huge reaction war is spreading through the left saying that woke had gone too far and that’s a major reason the right conquered the general public. I have my doubts about the truth of this. For me, woke meant simply treating each other equally and was also glaringly obvious as a way to run a society.
I’m white and I’ve read enough by people of color (still no better term) to know that I don’t see the world as they do and that liberal whites have long been scorned as ignorant hypocrites whose good intentions paved myriad roads. I can’t include this one. Satire necessarily must invoke the thing being satirized.
The fourth stanza of For The Fallen is the piece of poetry I have heard most often in my lifetime. It is read out in every RSL club in Australia every night at 6PM. That is about 1,000 venues a day.
I don’t know if Trillin took any Classics courses at Yale, but his poem does have a few faint echoes of Horace’s Satire 2.2:
…It’s not
So long since the auctioneer Gallonius’ serving sturgeon,
Caused a scandal. And the sea hid as much turbot, then.
Yet turbot were still safe, and storks safe in their nests,
Till a creative “praetor” led you astray! So that now,
If someone proclaimed roast seagulls were tasty,
The youth of Rome, so easily seduced, would agree.
Nitpick: Philip Larkin, as it states in your link preview.
Some of Dorothy Parker’s epigrams might count, too.
I could also add children’s folk poetry: Rain, rain, go away / come again some other day and Eenie meenie miney moe are definitely poetry.
Poem: The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman
Including songs: They Not Like Us by Kendrick Lamar
How well-known is “Footprints” outside of the English-speaking world? How well-known is “If I Must Die”?