That's too recent. Surely, poetry has been dead for at least one score [Gettysburg Address reference, for those paying attention]. Why is poetry dead? Bruce Wexler states:From the Me Generation of the '70s to the get-rich-quick '80s, our culture became intensely prosaic. Ambiguity, complexity and paradox fell out of favor. We embraced easily defined goals and crystal-clear communication (Ronald Reagan was president, presiding over the literalization of America). Fewer politicians seemed to quote contemporary poets in speeches, and the relatively small number of name-brand, living American poets died or faded from view.
His explanation is plausible, and, most likely, accurate. I would like to proffer a different reason. Poetry never adapted. It never became modern or experimental or tantalizing. At least not enough. I, as I have stated at least two other times, am a fan of Charles Bukowski. He was a prolific poet, in addition to his novels. Most of his poems deal with the same themes as his longer works: alcoholism, womanizing, gambling, depravity, mundaneness, etc. The difference is, in his longer works, there's more of a payoff. You become invested in the characters, their travails. In his poetry, which predominantly, if not completely, fails to rhyme, he tells a story. Quick blurbs. His words carefully chosen, selected for their inherent value and stacked up one after the other until he built a substantial enough enclosure to gaze at and admire. But it is not enough, it only provides an evanescent feeling of comprehension. Further, without rhyming, Bukowski's poetry fails to induce the sonic pleasure spawned from like-sounding words. His poems are direct and cold and rough like bricks sitting in your freezer.
For example, Trashcan Lives by Charles Bukowski:
the wind blows hard tonight
and it's a cold wind
and I think about
the boys on the row.
I hope some of them have a bottle of
red.
it's when you're on the row
that you notice that
everything
is owned
and that there are locks on
everything.
this is the way a democracy
works:
you get what you can,
try to keep that
and add to it
if possible.
this is the way a dictatorship
works too
only they either enslave or
destroy their
derelicts.
we just forgot ours.
in either case
it's a hard
cold
wind.
Disjointed, straggling, short on punctuation. Experimental. When I read it, I know I'm supposed to feel moved. I should feel affected, but I don't.
My colleague, Fara, knows a lot about poetry. I know this because she can recite stanzas upon stanzas of poetry from memory. Sometimes, when we're having tea in my office she'll write out these poems on my note paper, which annoys me because (a) no one should know a poem by heart, let alone the number of poems that she does and (b) she wastes all of my note paper on poems that I never want to read. In fact, the last time she did this, I took the paper from her hands and ripped it up in her face and threw the pieces in the air hoping to teach her a lesson. I'm not sure whether that lesson was learned because that was my last piece of paper, so, regardless, there have been no more poems.
For example, here is an excerpt (or perhaps the whole) from one of those poems by some poet I believe she wrote was named, Vachel Lindsay, but that name seems like make-believe; as for the title, beats me:
Let not young souls be smothered out
Before they do great deeds and
fully flaunt their pride;
The world's one crime its babes
grow dull,
Its poor are oxlike, limp, and
leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve,
but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow,
but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve,
but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die,
but that they die like sheep.
At least it rhymes. Pride, leaden-eyed. Reap, sheep. If a poem doesn't rhyme, I usually don't want to read it. Still, no matter how enchanting this poem is, and many others like it are, I'm not satiated with a poem. It's fleeting, a parakeet that perches on my finger, then flies off swiftly before I've had a chance to feel it's feathers. When I read, I want to sink my teeth into the story, language, moral, characters, dialogue, meaning. I want a chicken dinner.
I want to make poetry relevant again. I want to revolutionize the genre. I want to create a new form. I've ventured into Haiku territory for movies, which I really enjoy, but to resurrect poetry, we need more. We need...wait for it...wait for it...wait for it...damn, I've got nothing.
Fine, I want more rhyming and I want it to make some sense and I want it to be either very funny or something to seduce women (that actually works) and I want clever style, be it a lot of alliteration or interesting use of syllables, I want it to be well-written (unless your goal is to write poorly as a form of social commentary), I want more people to write poetry after they graduate high school where they spent countless hours brooding over their Mead spiral notebook wearing black jeans or plaid shirts or vintage clothing, sketching doodles or writing sonnets and poems and telling themselves that they were the next Walt Whitman or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or Sylvia Plath and generally annoyed everyone else because of their pretentiousness and sense of monopoly on pain and cynicism. Now they have jobs, and their Mead notebooks lie dusty in boxes in closets where their poetry continues to decline at an accelerated rate in readability. It's time to go to the stationery store, walk past the protractors, skip over the crayons, thumb over the oak tag, and find a college-ruled notebook. Go to a Starbucks or a Panera Bread, sit down, and start writing poems. Now that you've lived a few years, you should finally have endured enough misery to actually write something worth reading. Poetry needs you, now more than ever.
And if that doesn't work, then I suggest we just change the name. "Poetry" and "poems" sounds lame. Rhymeys and rhymes. Now that's catchy.
Jared
For example, Trashcan Lives by Charles Bukowski:
the wind blows hard tonight
and it's a cold wind
and I think about
the boys on the row.
I hope some of them have a bottle of
red.
it's when you're on the row
that you notice that
everything
is owned
and that there are locks on
everything.
this is the way a democracy
works:
you get what you can,
try to keep that
and add to it
if possible.
this is the way a dictatorship
works too
only they either enslave or
destroy their
derelicts.
we just forgot ours.
in either case
it's a hard
cold
wind.
Disjointed, straggling, short on punctuation. Experimental. When I read it, I know I'm supposed to feel moved. I should feel affected, but I don't.
My colleague, Fara, knows a lot about poetry. I know this because she can recite stanzas upon stanzas of poetry from memory. Sometimes, when we're having tea in my office she'll write out these poems on my note paper, which annoys me because (a) no one should know a poem by heart, let alone the number of poems that she does and (b) she wastes all of my note paper on poems that I never want to read. In fact, the last time she did this, I took the paper from her hands and ripped it up in her face and threw the pieces in the air hoping to teach her a lesson. I'm not sure whether that lesson was learned because that was my last piece of paper, so, regardless, there have been no more poems.
For example, here is an excerpt (or perhaps the whole) from one of those poems by some poet I believe she wrote was named, Vachel Lindsay, but that name seems like make-believe; as for the title, beats me:
Let not young souls be smothered out
Before they do great deeds and
fully flaunt their pride;
The world's one crime its babes
grow dull,
Its poor are oxlike, limp, and
leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve,
but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow,
but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve,
but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die,
but that they die like sheep.
At least it rhymes. Pride, leaden-eyed. Reap, sheep. If a poem doesn't rhyme, I usually don't want to read it. Still, no matter how enchanting this poem is, and many others like it are, I'm not satiated with a poem. It's fleeting, a parakeet that perches on my finger, then flies off swiftly before I've had a chance to feel it's feathers. When I read, I want to sink my teeth into the story, language, moral, characters, dialogue, meaning. I want a chicken dinner.
I want to make poetry relevant again. I want to revolutionize the genre. I want to create a new form. I've ventured into Haiku territory for movies, which I really enjoy, but to resurrect poetry, we need more. We need...wait for it...wait for it...wait for it...damn, I've got nothing.
Fine, I want more rhyming and I want it to make some sense and I want it to be either very funny or something to seduce women (that actually works) and I want clever style, be it a lot of alliteration or interesting use of syllables, I want it to be well-written (unless your goal is to write poorly as a form of social commentary), I want more people to write poetry after they graduate high school where they spent countless hours brooding over their Mead spiral notebook wearing black jeans or plaid shirts or vintage clothing, sketching doodles or writing sonnets and poems and telling themselves that they were the next Walt Whitman or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or Sylvia Plath and generally annoyed everyone else because of their pretentiousness and sense of monopoly on pain and cynicism. Now they have jobs, and their Mead notebooks lie dusty in boxes in closets where their poetry continues to decline at an accelerated rate in readability. It's time to go to the stationery store, walk past the protractors, skip over the crayons, thumb over the oak tag, and find a college-ruled notebook. Go to a Starbucks or a Panera Bread, sit down, and start writing poems. Now that you've lived a few years, you should finally have endured enough misery to actually write something worth reading. Poetry needs you, now more than ever.
And if that doesn't work, then I suggest we just change the name. "Poetry" and "poems" sounds lame. Rhymeys and rhymes. Now that's catchy.Jared
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