Even though I grew up in a poor, rural town, our school textbooks from elementary school all the way through high school drilled poetry and poetry techniques into our little brains. Even back in the 1980’s, a got the feeling that they were teaching us antiquated subject matter that maybe only a few ever truly liked but was still way more popular in times past.
I know that there are those few out there that love poetry. I also know that poetry lives on in song lyrics, crappy love poems and limericks.
However, I am wondering if the simple read forms of serious poetry were ever all that popular and, if they were, what happened to it.
I see people of all types love paintings, books, and sculptures as serious art but poetry not so much. I always considered myself strong in the language arts but I never really got it and and don’t think most people do either. The fact that arbitrary words happen to sound better than others while read together doesn’t mean much in the overall scheme of things.
My theory is that it’s just another victim of the devaluation of education in America. It’s the same as the geography and science retardation that have become standard. It’s been going on for a while, decades, but when you have an administration that comes out “against” evolution (which is kind of like being against “north” or “9”) while simultaneously calling for better science education, I don’t see a fix looming.
Poetry readings were high-class entertainment once, and still are, to a lesser extent. I think the popularity of poetry (as distinct from song lyrics) has declined due to competition from other forms of entertainment, starting with the invention of the radio.
If you want to hear poetry nowadays, go to open-mike night at your nearest artsy coffeehouse. They still have those, I believe. But we might never again see a time when a poet is a “star” the way Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg were in their days.
lissener might have a political axe to grind here, but I don’t see a very big conspiracy, or even fuck up due to lack of education. Poetry is alive and well as musical lyrics.
There are loads of new books being written, movies made, pictures painted, plays acted. There’s very little new poetry published. However, the music industry is now the place to find poetry, from the trite to the profound. Notice how poetry slam grew at about the same rate that rap music became popular. I’d go as far as saying that rap is the modern poetry:
Not the same thing, by the stretchiest remoteness. I can count on one hand the lyricists whose lyrics stand on their own as poetry. Just not the same thing.
And not an axe at all. I’m trying to understand a cultural context. Such considerations are not irrelevant.
I tend to blame what you might call the ‘Gentrification’ of poetry. Poetry was once a form of entertainment accessible to everyone, although it could also be as artfully designed as the poet’s inspiration could manage. With the advent of a lot of things I’m going to lump under the term ‘free verse’ there arose an idea that there was an artfullness to poetry which was independent of or even defied the kind of artfullness which made the form entertaining. This kind of thinking escalated to the point that popular appeal was seen as a negative quality in a poem. At first it was just that people trained in traditional verse techniques could do wonderful things by breaking away from the strictures the tradition imposed on them. Subsequently, their work was imitated by people who never actually studied the traditional verse techniques to begin with, and were encouraged to assume they were just a hindrance anyway, and so didn’t have the mental tools to see the subtleties underlying the things they were imitating. But luckily, poetry readers had become accustomed to putting up with a great deal of obscurity – even to the point of putting more value on things that were hard to understand on the grounds that the alternative was to risk being exposed as not ‘getting it.’
Todays poetry fans are those who can afford to sink tremendous mental capital into the low yields of todays poets. Everybody else has been priced out of the market.
I think you’re right, and I think the decline can be linked to the decline in people reading out loud. In the old days, before radio & TV, people did a lot more reading aloud to each other, if I understand correctly. The family might gather around in the evening to listen to the latest chapter of Dickens while they worked on their sewing or mending or whatever. And poetry lent itself well to this kind of reading.
I also agree with The Gaspode; and I was gonna track down that other thread and link to it, but ultrafilter beat me to it.
I’m a musicgeek of at least 25 obsessive years, on a lifelong quest for (among holier grails) lyricists whose stuff works as poetry. Worked in record stores, radio stations; produced a radio show, have published music criticism. Is there a folksinger in a coffeeshop in New Zealand or Mobile whose lyrics I haven’t heard? Yes. You win; I don’t have any right to have an opinion on the matter till I’ve heard their work.
Now, doesn’t the ridiculousness of this post demonstrate how irrelevant “credentials” are to a discussion of artistic opinion?
I would argue that rap is by no coincidence strikingly similar to strong stress and tumbling verse, and that there is reason to believe that these are the most natural prosodies the language lends itself too.
As for musical lyrics, the problem is that the music itself can take a lot of burden off the lyricist. Even Shakespeare coasted with “hey nonny nonny” in parts of his songs.
The problem with that, I think, is that virtually any Joe Schmoe thinks he can write poetry and read it in public. This lends itself to all sorts of crappy coffeehouse schlock.
I think that JohnnyAngel’s “Gentrification” theory is fairly sound in the matter. There are certainly other factors with at least as much importance, but it has some excellent points. Not all of ee cummings can be read aloud. Concrete poetry, like atonal music was experimental and not always successful (and put a lot of people off serious music and poetry). Add to that the general dumbing down of vocabulary and an increasing reliance on visuals to convey meaning (as opposed to words) and you get at least a couple of generations who can’t even decode a cereal box, let alone a poem.
Our average vocabulary is lacking in regards to poetry and looking it up is almost a dirty phrase. At the risk of offending, I think a lot of rap revels in the coarse, sparse, dullness of language that is limited.
In addition to that I’m reminded of our failure to nurture culturally, at least here in the US, metaphor, simile, and imagination. We have become like pale imitations of Romans who were mainly interested in the bottom line value of things, not their theortical possibilites. The Greeks asked “Why?” and reveled in the process of discovering and imagining the answers to that question. The Romans asked “What good is it?” and if it didn’t serve a practical purpose usually disdained it.
Poetry asks why and revels in not only the asking, but the coming to an understanding of it.
We don’t value that and we don’t, as a general rule, have the imagination or practical learning to explore it.
Hm. Is poetry more popular than it is in the US in every other country in the world?
I’d guess, actually, that poetry has fallen out of favor as people have more and more sources of entertainment to choose from. (“Entertainment” isn’t the only function poetry performs, of course, but it’s broad enough to fit this context.) When people could listen to poetry, sing, or draw pictures, poetry had a much larger audience (percentagewise) than when people can read poetry, listen to poetry, listen to music on CD, go to a concert, watch a movie, watch TV, read a novel, read Salon.com, post to the Straight Dope, play Halo, or attend a play. It’s harder and harder to be a polymath, because culture is more and more poly.
(Side note: Are we arguing that poetry is an honorific, or a genre? lissener’s stance on song lyrics seems to be arguing honorific, while I would argue it’s a genre. All song lyrics are poetry, but most song lyrics are bad poetry.)
