The problem with poetry today
NOTE: The following is a post I wrote for Brad’s Reader when I used the Blogger platform. In those days I got very little traffic, so I’m assuming most of you haven’t read this post (if you have, then I apologize). What you read here is just as the original was posted, only I cleaned up some very embarrassing mistakes.
Poets generally live in a different world than the rest of society. That is not necessarily a bad thing. However, there is also a pervasive idea among the poetry community that anything "mainstream" or "popular" is bad because it somehow cheapens a poem. This is where the problem starts to emerge.
Poetry is not as wildly popular today as it once was, that is no secret. Most poets will not make a living writing poems. If a book of poems sells over 2,000 copies, then it’s considered a success. By all signs, poetry has fallen off the radar of the general public.
The result is that poets are pulled into two different directions: on the one hand, they shake their fists at anything too commercialized, and at the same time, dream of writing poetry full-time. However, that dream cannot come to fruition unless their poetry becomes commercialized and popular – the very thing they detest.
See the problem here?
The solution requires a give-and-take on both sides of the aisle. First, poets need to worry less about the meaning of popularity and commercialization, and worry more about writing poems geared more for a general audience. Make people excited about poetry again! Secondly, the public-at-large needs to give poetry a chance and not simply write it off as a lost art. Much pleasure can be taken from reading a poem and dwelling in the very possibility that its meaning can express something otherwise un-expressable.
Finally, is there anything wrong with being popular? Shakespeare’s plays were wildly popular during his own time and now he’s credited as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, writer of the English Language. In fact, some credit Shakespeare with spreading English throughout the world.
No doubt, not everyone can be a Shakespeare. But my point is that it just goes to show that not everything that is popular is bad. A little popularity will take poetry a long way.
Why do you think poetry has dropped in popularity? What can be done to bring poetry back to the "masses"?
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