Obviously, the writer of this essay is out of contact with the reality of poetry. I find it difficult to believe the author would have this perception about poetry, more so with him living close to Chicago since the Chicago metropolitan area is one of the bastions of poetry in the United States (go to ChicagoPoetry.com). Yet this perspective is held by mainstream America. I know since I???ve been a poet all my life and in my experience Americans in general do not regard poets or artists for that matter with respect or admiration as in other countries. For example, the portrait of Juana de Ibarbourou, a poet from Uruguay, is on the 1,000-peso bill. The author is right in some of his comments. Poetry does require work and therefore the mentally challenged ???as the author- will find poetry difficult to read.
cheyo
Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?
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It is difficult to imagine a world without movies, plays, novels and music, but a world without poems doesn't have to be imagined. I find it disturbing that no one I know has cracked open a book of poetry in decades and that I, who once spent countless hours reading contemporary poets like Lowell and Berryman, can no longer even name a living poet.
All this started to bother me when heiress Ruth Lilly made an unprecedented donation of $100 million to Poetry Magazine in November. An article published on the Poetry International Web site said critics and poets agreed that the gift "could change the face of American poetry."
Don't these critics and poets realize that their art form is dead? Perhaps not. They probably also don't realize that people like me helped kill it.
In high school, I, like most of my classmates, hated the poetry unit in English class that surfaced annually with the same grim regularity as the gymnastics unit in physical education. Just as I was a good athlete who detested the parallel bars, I was an avid reader who despised rhymed and rhythmic writing. Plowing through tangled symbol and allusion, I wondered why the damn poets couldn't just say what they meant.
Then I went to college and at some point, I got it. Maybe it was when I was infatuated with some girl and read "I Knew a Woman" by Theodore Roethke: "I knew a woman, lovely in her bones/When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them." Or maybe it happened when I read Keats's odes or Eliot's "Prufrock" or that haunting line in Frost: "I have been one acquainted with the night." For the next 10 years or so, I was hooked. I read poetry, wrote it and recited verse to impress dates.
And then my interest waned. On the surface, I suppose it was because I had other interests that demanded my time and attention: I got married, had children, pursued my career, bought a house. With apologies to Frost, I began to find more relevance in articles about interest rates than essays on the sprung rhythm of Hopkins.
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