On perspectives about poetry
I donāt know about the public perspective at largeātheyāre not a monolith, so in a way this is an impossible question to answerābut most of my students arenāt writing or English majors, so I can use them as a limited cross section here.
Most of my students come into my classes not having read poetry outside of a high school classroom (except perhaps as a greeting card), and most of what they read then was pretty formal and perhaps not very dense. Often they think of poems as puzzles to be unlocked wherein they will discover a Truth! that will make all the difference. And certainly some poems attempt to do that, though most donāt.
The other misconception (Iām giving you two) that many outside the literary community have about poetry is the idea that itās not for them. And they have reason. Poetry reminds me of jazz, in a way, in that thereās great variety in styles and approaches, and yet very little of it has a massive following. Smooth jazz appeals to one kind of listener and free jazz another and swing yet another and so on. You can find poetryās influence in all manner of writing, just as you can find jazz underneath most musical forms today, but few people spend time with the source material outside the practitioners.
Iām not suggesting this is a marketing failure, by the wayāit could be that this is just the nature of the art form. But I canāt tell you the number of students Iāve had whoāve told me at the end of a semester that theyād never been interested in poetry before whoāve since bought collections, just because theyād never been exposed to a style or type of poetry that made them go āwow! Language can do that?!ā the way E. E. Cummings did to me in my junior year of high school.
As for people inside the literary community, well, again, weāre not a monolith, but I think sometimes weāre a little doom and gloom. I think that when our literary grandchildren look back on this periodāthe early 21st centuryātheyāll recognize it as a moment as alive and explosive for poetry at the Modernist period a century previous. I think weāre in the middle of a fundamental shift in the way poetry is written and published and expressed and a lot of it has to do with the digital landscape weāre working in now.
