That's the title of a new article in The Paris Review blog: "Does Poetry Have Street Cred?"
When we think of poetry, we often cringe and whinge "it's so dense", "it's incomprehensible", "it's boring". A lot of that, I think, has to do with the way we were introduced to poetry in school. We were taught structure—using near-incomprehensible terms—rather than being given full rein to the exploration of how the poems speak to us individually. We were introduced to the Romantic poets and the American fireside poets exposing us to "beautiful language"—and primarily in a language that seemed archaic and had no application to our modern lives. Seldom, and for only the few lucky among us, was the exploration of the Renaissance poets encouraged, the satire of Alexander Pope or John Dryden. We learned Shakespeare's sonnets and we devoted some little time to the ancient epics such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey and The Iliad. And we yawned through it all.
And prose writers suffer because of it. We can't find the words, we struggle against clichés instead of developing the ability to create the perfect metaphor. Our writing has lost cadence and, sometimes, meaning.
Poetry was the predominant form of literature—the earliest forms were spoken and sung—for thousands of years and it spoke to everyone. When did the shift occur and what caused it?
So, in an age of Nobel laureate Bob Dylan can poetry regain its street cred?
When we think of poetry, we often cringe and whinge "it's so dense", "it's incomprehensible", "it's boring". A lot of that, I think, has to do with the way we were introduced to poetry in school. We were taught structure—using near-incomprehensible terms—rather than being given full rein to the exploration of how the poems speak to us individually. We were introduced to the Romantic poets and the American fireside poets exposing us to "beautiful language"—and primarily in a language that seemed archaic and had no application to our modern lives. Seldom, and for only the few lucky among us, was the exploration of the Renaissance poets encouraged, the satire of Alexander Pope or John Dryden. We learned Shakespeare's sonnets and we devoted some little time to the ancient epics such as The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Odyssey and The Iliad. And we yawned through it all.
And prose writers suffer because of it. We can't find the words, we struggle against clichés instead of developing the ability to create the perfect metaphor. Our writing has lost cadence and, sometimes, meaning.
Poetry was the predominant form of literature—the earliest forms were spoken and sung—for thousands of years and it spoke to everyone. When did the shift occur and what caused it?
. . . the late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz—who defined poetry as “the passionate pursuit of the Real”—pinpointed the source of division to the moment in the nineteenth century when, just as the physical laws and equations of science began to assert themselves aggressively as the only relevant language to explain phenomena, poets with an eye on posterity (Ars longa, Vita brevis) resolutely glorified the poem as “Art” for its own sake (L’art pour L’art), with no grander aims than to serve as a vehicle for their fame. The result? A weakening if not a loss of the poet’s divine imagination, through which humankind once profited from the ability to provide consoling metaphors and language that explained our passage from life to death. And thus, says Milosz, the bond between the poet and the “great human family” ruptured, leaving us with no more than slim “volumes of poems incomprehensible to the public” amounting to a collection of “broken whisperand dying laughter.”
So, in an age of Nobel laureate Bob Dylan can poetry regain its street cred?
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