Does poetry matter in the age of Trump?

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William Haskins

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Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. Does poetry matter in the age of Trump?

Julia Munslow

Yahoo News
August 2, 2017

<snip>

But can poetry — an art form often regarded as elite and esoteric — actually change anything in the era of Trump, who has cultivated an image as a populist?

“Truth be told, different things matter to different people,” said Amit Majmudar, the poet laureate of Ohio.

Majmudar, who edited the poetry anthology “Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now,” a collection of poems intended to capture the climate after the 2016 election, freely admits that poetry is important only to a minuscule segment of the general population. A recent survey reports that only 7 percent of American adults read poetry, down by nearly half from a decade ago.

Those who write, though, have seemingly shot to the forefront of the national stage for their Trump protest poetry, similar to how poets have jumped to the front of national conversation during times of antiwar protests.

Even poets from the past, such as Robert Frost, have resurfaced in the news. The 20th-century poet wrote “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. …/ Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out” in “Mending Wall,” a poem that has been featured in several articles about Trump’s plan to construct a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

But Majmudar said that poetry and its reach haven’t changed. Rather, media coverage of poets has.

“Poets … are entering the media cycle because the media cycle is concerned with what they’re talking about,” Majmudar said. “Trump is the driver.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/something-doesnt-love-wall-poetry-matter-age-trump-090027168.html
 

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That's an interesting article.

This statement jumped out at me.

“[Poetry is] essential to the whole democratic project,” Pinsky said. “It was traditionally part of the education of ruling classes, and in our country the ruling class is supposed to be the people, everybody.”

Lately, I've run across a large number of people who think that including the traditional elements of a liberal education in high school and college curriculum (including poetry) is a waste of time for students who are supposed to just be learning how to do a job (and be good little worker bees). The attitude seems to be that liberal education is only for the elite, and trying to foist it off on the masses is elitist.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but intentional or not, this idea is playing right into certain hands in a most convenient way. I'm a science type, so I think scientific literacy is critical (and lament how that's going down the crapper), but of all the classes I took in high school, my senior AP lit class is the one that's stuck with me most over the years. It wasn't perfect (far too little attention was given to writers who weren't white and male), but we spent a lot of time on poetry, and it helped develop my interest in critical thinking.
 

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Reading poetry closely, carefully (and I'm absolutely including song lyrics) and talking about it teaches rhetoric without a whip.
 

Ari Meermans

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Well, it is certainly an interesting article. I can't agree with it in its totality, though. Poetry always has been the language and medium of protest. As such it found its home in the heads and hearts of the young adults of my generation. I guess I've assumed that is the usual case. Maybe not. But this I do know: I didn't learn of the poets of the Beat Generation, of Jack Kerouac, of Langston Hughes, of Allen Ginsberg, or even of Pablo Neruda from broadcast media of that day. It was underground via the counter-culture. There was a group of us in college who would sit around on the floors of shabby off-campus apartments and discuss those poets and their work far into the night. It was there that I discovered the poetry that speaks most particularly to me.

So I wonder. I wonder if fewer adults now read poetry, is it really down to the media? Is it that today's poetry doesn't speak in the same way to young adults now? Is it a combination of factors? I don't know, but I can't help but think that the audience is there.
 

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Well the poets of the Harlem Renaissance wrote back in much tougher times in the 1920s. And a couple of years ago, I went onto Egyptian twitter and found tweets filled with ghazals in French and Arabic, creative responses to tyranny. All over the world poets are writing from prisons in Turkey, Mexico, Afghanistan, North Korea. I'm sitting with a copy of poems by Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel laureate who died in a Chinese prison so recently. And poets write from exile, from the African diaspora, from trans and LGBTI silences, they learn new languages, they find readers in unlikely places. It irks me so much when people talk as if poetry is some inessential luxury for university-educated middle-class Westerners and as if that is all poetry can be, and as if Trump is the only challenge for poets in today's world. Sorry to sound grumpy.

I do wish there was a publishing industry that did more to support poets, more poetry writing opportunities in prison, more literature out in translation, more places on the Internet to share poetry. But poetry has a bigger readership globally than many of us realise.
 
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Ari Meermans

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It's okay. You go ahead and be grumpy. Ours is a world made for grumpy—and more. Everything you say regarding poetry—as well as literature, in general—as a response to global tyranny is true. (Our desire to awaken readership of international lit was an impetus for the revamp of this room.)

It's not that Trump is the only challenge for poets in today's world; it's that his rise and that of other Western leaders like him represent a threat almost unknown in living memory in the West. Only the oldest among us are old enough to hold clear memory of a like threat to the West.

I wish more people did read and appreciate poetry for its beauty and its ability to reach the deepest recesses of emotion and thought. The whiplash of populism and anti-intellectualism shouldn't silence it; it should only strengthen its voice and its reach. Should.
 
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M Louise

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Ari, I do get the threat posed by Trump's populism and a philistine culture to poetry, readers and writers. And it's a hard time for lovers of global literature because most publishing industries are in free-fall.

But post-grump, I have such faith in the power of poetry to touch places that political speeches and rhetoric can't reach. After the appalling attck in Manchester, UK, last month, the poet Tony Walsh recited his poem This Is The Place to a packed Albert Square of grieving angry people who needed to hear that poem. Redefining Manchester's greatness as courage (not economic prosperity), as the spirit to keep surviving. In very dark hours, poetry moves all of us.

Nothing elitist there.

And this is the place where our folks came to work, where they struggled in puddles, they hurt in the dirt and they built us a city, they built us these towns and they coughed on the cobbles to the deafening sound to the steaming machines and the screaming of slaves, they were scheming for greatness, they dreamed to their graves.

And they left us a spirit. They left us a vibe. The Mancunian way to survive and to thrive and to work and to build, to connect, and create and greater ― Manchester’s greatness is keeping it great.
 

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Thank you for the link, M Louise. This Is The Place is stirring and was, I'm sure, just what the people of Manchester needed to hear.
 

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I didn't learn of the poets of the Beat Generation, of Jack Kerouac, of Langston Hughes, of Allen Ginsberg, or even of Pablo Neruda from broadcast media of that day. It was underground via the counter-culture. There was a group of us in college who would sit around on the floors of shabby off-campus apartments and discuss those poets and their work far into the night. It was there that I discovered the poetry that speaks most particularly to me.

This is still true. I've seen it. I've been seeing it since the 1980s; some of the poetry has changed, and I'm seeing a lot more of this happening in dorms with freshmen and sophomores looking at lyrics.

Robert Frost and e e cummings seem to be having a surge in popularity.
 

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Lately, I've run across a large number of people who think that including the traditional elements of a liberal education in high school and college curriculum (including poetry) is a waste of time for students who are supposed to just be learning how to do a job (and be good little worker bees). The attitude seems to be that liberal education is only for the elite, and trying to foist it off on the masses is elitist.


I was surprised by a strong sense of this at NC State. When we went to three different events there, we were told over and over that our student would be able to write a resume, interview well, and career plan after her stint at NC State. Um, that's possibly a weekend seminar, not a college education. It was one of the main reasons she did not choose to go there.


As for the article, I think poetry is not only important, but it's essential in these times. It's all well and good to entertain a middle ground with dialogue on populism and elitism and many brands of horsheshit that I hope are vulnerable to lethal doses of conversation, all while the "elitists" get on with what they love about the world and our minds in the world, snagging converts whenever and wherever they can.

Good poetry is an elegant middle finger in all of this.
 
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