Tag Archives: Poetry is king

Gloomy, Elitist and Irrelevant

Most people also have a narrow definition of poetry.
When told that poetry can include rap, football chants and verses in greeting cards, they become more supportive of the medium. […]
The public has a problem with the image of poetry. It was often perceived as out-of-touch, gloomy, irrelevant, effeminate, high-brow and elitist. […]
Amongst the general public, contemporary poetry had an even more negative image.
On first reflection it was commonly perceived as inaccessible, complex and lacking rhyme and rhythm.

Full article by David Lister HERE

 

 

A Limp and Fangless Thing

       There are about six people who buy new poetry, but they are not feeling very well. I bumped very lightly into one of them while walking down the sidewalk, and for a while I was terrified that I would have to write to eleven MFA programs explaining why everyone was going to have to apply for grants that year. The last time I stumbled upon a poetry reading, the attendees were almost without exception students of the poet who were there in the hopes of extra credit. One of the poems, if memory serves, consisted of a list of names of Supreme Court justices. I am not saying that it was a bad poem. It was a good poem, within the constraints of what poetry means now. But I think what we mean by poetry is a limp and fangless thing.

Alexandra Petri: Is poetry dead? 

Read full piece HERE

To the Perplexed Reader

…since the would-be quantitative poet was obliged to remember constantly the arbitrarily assigned “quantities” of the English syllables he chose to use, quantitative composition was a laborious academic-theoretical business, like all such nonempirical enterprises more gratifying to the self-congratulating practitioner than to the perplexed reader.

P. Fussel, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Ch. 4: The Historical Dimension