A Question about Poetry - Past and now Present

[Uncarved]

I'd like to start a discussion on people's viewpoints in regards to poetry.

I remember as a child checking out every single poetry book that the school library had. Longfellow, Keats, and Byron being my favorites. I revelled in the way it rolled along, telling its story.

I remember thinking that it was so respected to be poet.

Then later, I delved into Plath and Parker, read about how difficult it was for them. I started thinking how poetry and pain were so interwoven.

Now today it seems that poetry is no longer taken seriously. Very few publishers take it and the majority of the poets are left to self-publish and hope for the best.

Now for the discussion... this is how I view poetry, then and now.

Is it just me? Has poetry had a downturn in your eyes as well, or is it just as meaningful and respected as it once was? Or do you think its always been an uphill struggle? I'm very much interested in other peoples views on this topic.

I don't write poetry. I do still read it, though.

[Magdalen]

Good Question!

For now, you should check out this AW thread:

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14413

[Debbie V]

Tough question indeed. I don't know that poetry has lost respect. Teenage girls still write it. It goes with the angst of those years. I think that it isn't taught young enough. Shakespeare is as much poetry as prose and well respected for plays and sonnets. Countries have national poets.

Perhaps it's not made to feel accessible and therefore the market isn't there, so it doesn't get published except in zines. A lot of magazines have light-hearted poems, but perhaps the readers don't even think of this as poetry. Poetry is so often about pain that it can feel like something lesser when it's not. Why don't humor books ever win the big prizes? This is the same phenomena.

Greeting cards are often poetry. (many, not very good poetry) But we don't read cards and think about how many poems we just read.

Less respected? I don't think so. Misunderstood? Yeah, that feels right.

[thehairymob]

To some readers it is seen as high winded, to lofty or at least that is my impression.

[Nikki]

I think poetry, like art, got a little... muddled in the past few decades. The post modernism... the post-post-modernism? It left a lot of "regular folks" (like, um, me) cold.
Except I'm not really regular folks. I have a Master's in Fiction Writing. I am a published poet. (THAT still surprises me no freaking end every time I think about it.) I'm also a soon-to-be published novelist. I read for fun every day of my life. I read poetry, fiction, non-fiction -- everything.
But for a long while, it felt like the writers I was "supposed" to be reading were so concerned with their own cleverness -- their deconstructing of whatever their thing was at the time -- that the reader (me) was secondary to their purpose.
(Ouch. I'm going to get in trouble for writing that. Oh, well. I've had a glass or three of wine, and I'm feeling honest.)
I think you should look at young adult literature - books like SOLD, or KARMA, or even Ron Koertge's SHAKESPEARE/BASEBALL series, to find where poetry has crossed back over into the hearts of its readers.
There are always cycles, of course, and startling events in history will bring a resurgence of poetry and poets - but if you're wondering where the poets are right now? The ones being read by hundreds of thousands of young, passionate people? Check out the "novels in verse" in the YA section.
Oh, and also? I write greeting cards, too. The schlocky poetry ones. Go ahead and mock me. My own MOM does. :)
But Dickens got paid by the word, right? Who am I, to be too precious?
Back to my wine now.

[Blarg]

Hey if you can pull in a few bucks doing it, more power to you. I've written a lot of marketing materials, and I don't feel bad about it, but glad that I could write something someone would use and pay me for.

Interesting tip about the poetry in young adult "novels in verse." I didn't know there even was such a category. But I'm an ignoramus re YA lit anyway. I'm just reading my first one, The Hunger Games, now, and enjoying it a lot. It reminds me a lot of the pure adventure stories from early in the last century -- Tarzan and such. Reading them was so much fun, never a slog. Giving a reader a good time has a lot of natural appeal.

Anyway, I think I'll see if I can find some free samples on Amazon of those books.

[Norman D Gutter]

Publishers publish what people will buy. If less poetry is being published than sometime in the past, that means fewer people are willing to buy it. We can discuss the reasons for that forever. In fact we're doing that in multiple "is poetry dead" threads.

As I've said before in other threads, it does seem that poetry and poets have lost influence in the world. Why? Did the poets quit paying attention to their audience and go off on a tangent that people no longer liked? Did the world (I'm looking at it from a USA filter) grow up enough to where they saw poetry as something less pleasing?

But poetry has not had a downturn in my eyes. I appreciate it more than I ever did. My preference it toward older poetry, but I'm working on appreciating the newer.

Best Regards,
NDG