The Future of Poetry

In the past couple of months, my interest in poetry has developed beyond my own expectations, somewhat surprising myself.  This partly stemmed from the recent English classes I've taken, and over last summer I was picking up the occassional poem to read.  Then something happened, I'm not quite sure what, but poetry has become a intense passion lately.  So, I'll have much to talk about this new journey.

This brings me to the recent essay "American Poetry in the New Century" by John Barr, the president of Poetry Foundation, originally published in the Sept 2006 issue of Poetry Magazine.

As I read his thoughts, I found them quite provocative and agreeable to my own sensibility.  The essay has also caused a minor stir in the poetry world, pissing off quite a few poets.  In addressing contemporary poetry John Barr basically says that it is tired and lacks the ability to address the audience.  Here are a few excerpts:

A new poetry becomes necessary not because we want one, but because the way poets have learned to write no longer captures the way things are, how things have changed. Reality outgrows the art form: the art form is no longer equal to the reality around it.

The need for something new is evident. Contemporary poetry's striking absence from the public dialogues of our day, from the high school classroom, from bookstores, and from mainstream media, is evidence of a people in whose mind poetry is missing and unmissed.

I think the responsibilities of the public to poetry are nil. No one should read poetry because they are supposed to. That's like listening to tony music that puts you to sleep when no one is looking. How often do you go to the movies out of a sense of duty? Rather, I think the responsibilities are all on the part of poetry to its public.

Poetry needs to find its public again, and address it. Poets can help accomplish this by bearing in mind the influences of how they live on what they write, and of what they write on how their readers live.

"To have great poets, there must be great audiences too," Whitman said, and then he wrote for them. Groundbreaking new art comes when artists make a changed assumption about their relationship to their audience, talk to their readers in a new way, and assume they will understand.

So, does poetry matter to anyone out there anymore?