The End of Verse?

In January, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled "Reading on the Rise," announcing that the number of American adults reading fiction had increased for the first time since the NEA began tracking reading habits in 1982. According to the report, 50.2 percent of adults had read a work of fiction in the previous year, compared with just 46.7 percent in 2002. The results were greeted with a mixture of excitement and caution by education experts. Some saw them as the long-awaited reversal of the trend toward a dumber, TV-obsessed United States; others, more wary, called them a statistical blip. Almost as an afterthought, the report also noted that the number of adults reading poetry had continued to decline, bringing poetry's readership to its lowest point in at least 16 years.

The dismal poetry findings stand in sharp contrast not only to the rise in general fiction reading, but also to the efforts of the country's many poetry-advocacy organizations, which for the past dozen years have been creating programs to attract larger audiences. These programs are at least in part a response to the growing sense that poetry is being forgotten in the U.S. They include National Poetry Month (April); readings, lectures and contests held across the country; initiatives to get poems into mainstream publications such as newspapers; and various efforts to boost poetry's presence online (poets.org, the Web site of the Academy of American Poets, even launched a mobile version optimized for use on the iPhone). Yet according to the NEA report, in 2008, just 8.3 percent of adults had read any poetry in the preceding 12 months. That figure was 12.1 percent in 2002, and in 1992, it was 17.1 percent, meaning the number of people reading poetry has decreased by approximately half over the past 16 years.

Sunil Iyengar, the NEA's director of the Office of Research and Analysis, says the agency can't answer with certainty why fewer adults are reading poetry. He and others believed the opposite would be true, largely because of poetry's expansion onto the Internet. "In fact," he says, "part of our surmise as to why fiction reading rates seem to be up might be due to greater opportunities through online reading. But we don't know why with poetry that's not the case."

Dana Gioia, who was chairman of the NEA when the new report was released but has since stepped down, credits the rise in fiction reading to a number of things, including more reading online; initiatives like the NEA's "Big Read," which began in 2006 and seeks to have whole communities read a literary work together; the efforts of educators; and the success of series such as the Harry Potter books and Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight." He also mentions Oprah's Book Club as a catalyst.

Poetry, for all its merits, has no program or volume to rival the current popularity of Oprah and Harry Potter, but even so, the decline of its already modest following is noteworthy. Some critics and readers claim that most poetry today is too cloistered and inaccessible, or that it is just plain bad. Yet a telephone survey conducted in 2005 by the National Opinion Research Center on behalf of the Poetry Foundation found that only 2 percent of respondents said they didn't read poetry because it was "too hard." And Donald Hall, a former U.S. poet laureate, points out that most poetry in any age is bad, and that hasn't kept people from reading in the past.

There might be other factors at work. According to the NORC survey, which included about 1,000 adults who read for pleasure primarily in English, people who don't like poetry—and therefore don't read it—are typically those who haven't been exposed to much of it. "Their in-school experiences were fairly limited, and most of them first read classic poetry, poetry which may be less accessible and which may seem less relevant to teenagers than might contemporary poetry," the report concluded. "It seems likely that people's perceptions of poetry are the greatest barriers to participation."

Exposing more people to poetry is exactly what advocates have been trying to do, and evidence suggests they've done quite well. National Poetry Month, for instance, which began in 1996, has become a fixture in thousands of schools and is celebrated in communities all over the country. Poets.org had more than 10 million visits last year, up from about 4.5 million in 2001, and Poetry magazine, one of the form's oldest and most venerable outlets in the U.S., has seen its circulation triple to 30,000 since 2003.

Perhaps the most successful, and forward-looking, program of the past few years has been Poetry Out Loud, a recitation competition for high-school students that is often compared to the Scripps National Spelling Bee. It was created by the NEA and the Poetry Foundation, and in 2006, its first year as a national contest, about 40,000 students participated. This year, nearly 300,000 students are taking part, reciting both contemporary and classical poetry. Stephen Young, the Poetry Foundation's program director, says the event was devised as a more lively way of engaging a young audience. "I think the timing seemed good because, in the years that memorizing and reciting of poetry had gone off the pedagogical map, the slam movement and hip-hop poetry and performance poetry had hit the scene," he says. "We conceived of Poetry Out Loud as another approach to teaching poetry, but perhaps more pleasurable than [how] poetry was taught when I was a high-school student."