Must be about time for someone else to tell us all how irrelevant poetry is these days and how it’s all our fault for making “pomes” too hard. Or rather, old Tom and Ezra’s fault. Time to dig up the modernists and burn them at the stake. Indeed, that bastion of middlebrow culture Time Magazine, which probably never even mentions poetry except how it’s dying as an art form, has succeeded in seriously pissing me off. As I said a few posts ago, poetry is actually thriving these days. And someone is obviously reading it. I always get a little uneasy, when someone who doesn’t know all that much about poetry writes an article about it.
Of course when they talk about American Culture abandoning poetry, they never consider it could be because a huge majority of the American public has simply better things to do. Like fret over Paris Hilton in jail, watch reality tv, and look at internet porn. American Culture tends to, by and large, continually cater to the lowest common denominator, and I’m not so sure I’m all that upset about them abandoning the art form. The bulk of the American Public does not read at all, or if they do, not much of anything beyond TV Guide and the Enquirer. Maybe Harry Potter. These sorts of articles always summon the golden age when poets were rock stars. Poets WERE rock stars, but only because reading and poetry were pretty much the bomb in those days. Besides the performing arts (which you exactly take home with you), that was pretty much the only entertainment one could get. So I suppose you could blame radio. But even radio, as it was conceived in it’s heyday, could be considered a dying form. Blame TV. Blame VCR’s, DVD Players, Tivo. Blame the internet. Even as late as the fifties and sixties poetry was still a bit more in the general culture because people lived their lives as readers, not observers.
(hmmm..Byron WAS sort of hot...)
