Sherry Chandler

Thanks to Robert Peake for giving us a sample of Stephen Fry’s work on language:

Stephen Fry is, of course, the author of The Ode Less Travelled By: Unlocking the Poet Within . He was, most notably in our household, Jeeves to Hugh Laurie’s Wooster. And just this weekend, coincidentally, our Netflix Adventure was the 1997 Wilde, starring Frye as Oscar himself and Jude Law as his young lover Alfred Douglas. It’s an interesting and daring movie, well worth watching.

(Watch for a young Orlando Bloom, playing a rentboy.)

Todd Swift was in a bitter mood when he wrote the following about media coverage of poetry and poets, but I think he articulates something all us poets feel:

…like parents who favour one sibling over another to an outrageous extent, novelists are showered with praise, attention, and - yes, this does matter - support - financial, logistical, cultural and otherwise. This magnitude of difference, in terms of public reception and recognition, between the poet and novelist, is so vast, as to beggar belief. It is made worse by prizes, which accentuate the have and have not poets. The greater public has near-zero tolerance for poets, but can muster a minimal shrug of spasmodic interest in a prize-winner. Ask the public to name poems they really love, then why. They really can’t.

We’ll put Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project to the side for the moment as a sort of artificial exercise. It is of the United States anyway, whereas Swift is a Canadian living in the United Kingdom (still United for a while). Other indicators are not so good, not just for poetry, but for all genres published in book form. Many papers are choosing not to run book reviews of any kind, and poetry reviews are non-existent. The NYTimes runs an occasional review of a poetry collection, but only those of the most established of poets.

I have a friend who thinks mediocre poetry read badly is what is killing us. But I’d say poetry readings are too sparsely attended for that to be the case. And I don’t have much faith in the Poetry Foundation’s ideas of popularizing poetry by bribing magazines to publish it. Or in Poetry Out Loud or the efforts of Robert Pinsky.

Even poets, those I know personally, seem to think novels are more important. Nearly all of them have to try their hand at writing a novel sooner or later. I suppose they’re desperate to make some money.

I have no resolution to these fairly gloomy Monday-morning musings. No schemes for saving poetry, though I rather suspect it will survive. Poets may not. But I suspect they will keep on, too.

For myself, as I get older, I find fewer and fewer novels that I consider worth my time. I turn more and more to poetry.