In my post, Poetry in the larger world, Crafty Green Poet commented:
I think the problem with poetry for many people is that although it is short it is often so multilayered that they can’t ‘get’ it straight away and turn to something more digestible. However long novels aren’t exactly immediately digestible either. Interesting thoughts…
Hmmm….
I think this a dangerous conception to have. It says that Poetry is just too hard for most people to “get.” Some of it, yes, is very hard, very convoluted. Some of it is just boring. In high school, when I studies poetry (the most attention Poetry gets from most people), it was largely limited to the classic masters of poetry. We talked about Shakespeare. Shakespeare had some good work, but his use of the English language is (1) British and (2) 500 years out of date. That makes it a bit more complicated. We talked about Byron, Longfellow, Yeats, Keats, Frost. All very talented, yes, but old, talking about subjects that, whatever you feel about it, do not resonate with today’s youth. The percentage of the American Youth that see Grecian Urns or lead horses through wint’ry forests is vanishingly small. So, poetry is hard, because the English teachers chose poetry that is great, classical, and hard. It survived the gauntlet of literary criticism, making it suitable as “literature.”
But not all poetry is “literature.” There has been a huge movement to take poetry out of the textbooks and put it on stage. Part of that movement is to give poetry to people and not poets. My point is that, as poets, educators, and people, we need to get the poetry out there that people can relate to and enjoy, even if it is only at an aesthetic or aural level. Even if the multi-layered meanings skip past them the first time they read or hear a poem, because I think they should be hearing and reading poems AT ALL.
A sickeningly large percent of the American populace does not read. I think this is a bad thing. Art, in all its forms, speaks about the world and informs us of how we perceive and are perceived. Poetry is an art form that can be put into the world in small bites. I think we need to put those bites out there, in schools, in public so they can be consumed, in the hopes that that can ignite a hunger, a passion, in some of its readers. While the classic poets may be really good, I don’t think that’s the message we need to send: that poetry is something done in the past and focused on rules, rhymes, rhythms, and coneeptual forms when that is a small subset of poetry.
We need to entice people to the poetic art form, challenge them to enjoy it. Market it to them on a level they get. Harry Potter is not an example of great literature, even in the fantasy, young adult genre. But it gets people to read. Maybe some of them will go from Rowlings to Pullman to Tolkien, or Martin. There is no reason not to do the same with poetry.
