Newsflash: poetry’s still dead

Newsweek says so and it must be true:

In January, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled “Reading on the Rise,” announcing that the number of American adults reading fiction had increased for the first time since the NEA began tracking reading habits in 1982. According to the report, 50.2 percent of adults had read a work of fiction in the previous year, compared with just 46.7 percent in 2002. The results were greeted with a mixture of excitement and caution by education experts. Some saw them as the long-awaited reversal of the trend toward a dumber, TV-obsessed United States; others, more wary, called them a statistical blip. Almost as an afterthought, the report also noted that the number of adults reading poetry had continued to decline, bringing poetry’s readership to its lowest point in at least 16 years.

The dismal poetry findings stand in sharp contrast not only to the rise in general fiction reading, but also to the efforts of the country’s many poetry-advocacy organizations, which for the past dozen years have been creating programs to attract larger audiences. These programs are at least in part a response to the growing sense that poetry is being forgotten in the U.S.

. . . The report is based on “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts,” conducted in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau. The survey’s sample was more than 18,000 adults, which the report points out is “roughly 20 times the size of the average media poll,” and it was balanced by the Census Bureau to “reflect the present U.S. population.” It is by far the largest recent study on reading in the U.S.

And then, of course, the article goes on to say, as all of these articles go on to say, that this obituary may be premature.

And it’s accompanied by the usual editorial averring that poetry is dead because Americans are lazy jerks.

By the ’90s, it was all over. If you doubt this statement, consider that poetry is the only art form where the number of people creating it is far greater than the number of people appreciating it. Anyone can write a bad poem. To appreciate a good one, though, takes knowledge and commitment. As a society, we lack this knowledge and commitment. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren’t willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly. They want narrative-driven forms, stand-alone art that doesn’t require an understanding of the larger context.

I, too, want these things. I am part of a world that apotheosizes the trendy, and poetry is just about as untrendy as it gets. I want to read books with buzz–in part because I make my living as a ghostwriter of and collaborator on books–and I can’t remember the last book of poetry that created even a dying mosquito’s worth of hum. I am also lazy, and poetry takes work.

Findings about poetry are always “dismal, dismal.” Nobody reads it. Certainly nobody buys it. More people write it than read it. What is more, those who write it can’t seem to count among those who appreciate it. Those who appreciate poetry must be learned and committed. Those who write it just have to jot something down, I guess.

Anyway practically every poet I know harbors a secret (or not-so-secret) ambition to write a novel. Or even better, a memoir. Memoirs are hot now. Everybody’s writing them.

Poor old poetry, once the crown of creation, now the red-headed stepchild. Poets are like Tibetan monks: a little exotic but essentially worthless because they have no commercial value.

And like Tibetan monks, then, they’re free, free! If you practice an art that nobody will ever read and nobody will ever buy, you can give up all ambition and devote yourself to the spiritual practice of the art. You’re a failure by definition. No pressure.

So I take my stand with Elizabeth Kateswitaj (with thanks to Morning Porch):

Minor Poet: A Declaration

This is a declaration, a speaking, a statement, not a manifesto. For a minor poet need not, must not possess the force to manifest a poetics in ideology. All a minor poet must say is �I am a poet� or even �this is a poem�. It may even be enough just to rhyme a couple words, but then that method depends too much on posterity.

I will leave nothing to chance. I will say it plain. I am a minor poet.

Possibly related posts:

Top 100 poetry blogs

Poetry and technology

James Baker Hall Memorial Prize in Poetry

Beginning National Poetry Month

Frog Poetry Contest

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.