How did poetry manage to fall down the stairs of relevance?

February 27, 2024 3:09 PM

Fast-forwarding to today, it seems that poetry no longer garners the attention that it used to. In the whirlwind of today’s society, poetry has found itself fighting for attention against newer art forms such as film and music. Movies and music have seamlessly captured the raw emotions and societal complexities that once danced within the lines of poems and they have done so in a manner that is outwardly more entertaining and approachable. All the while, poetry has taken a dramatic shift and evolved into an art form that is highly confessional and often accompanied by illustrations and other visuals. It is certainly possible that this increasingly personal style of poetry has not appealed to all enthusiasts of this genre and this may attribute to a decline in readership. from Should Modern Newspapers Publish Poetry? [The Artifice]
posted by chavenet (45 comments total)

Poetry works so much better for me as a spoken medium. Youtube has been a real revelation, for example Eliot reading The Wasteland.

Contemporary poetry is often called "hip hop" and is largely a performed, not written medium.

This revelation came some years after my 10 year old AskMe question.
posted by Nelson at 3:19 PM on February 27 [15 favorites]

"...this poem could act as a segway of sorts."

Oh. Oh no.
posted by mittens at 3:49 PM on February 27 [36 favorites]

I wondered, reading this, whether the writer realized that newspaper poetry used to be a thing, and that it's only kind of recently that it disappeared? The problem is, we've been watching the newspaper industry decline, with local papers closing down, consolidating, shifting ever rightward. I think we know exactly what kind of poetry would appear there, and yeah, it'd probably have a lot more in common with Kipling than Atwood.
posted by mittens at 3:59 PM on February 27 [5 favorites]

newspapers should use graffiti, tagging, stickering signs, and knit warfare.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 4:21 PM on February 27 [6 favorites]

as a counterproposal i present the idea that poetry journals should cover news

and that the best replacement for the dying field of journalism-for-pay is old-school zines _{^{n.b. this is one of those things that i will if pressed dig in on really hard in that way that i do until it becomes a whole deal}}
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:21 PM on February 27 [13 favorites]

^^ the most lowercase of bombastic lowercase pronouncements :)
posted by martin q blank at 4:24 PM on February 27 [5 favorites]

> newspapers should use graffiti, tagging, stickering signs, and knit warfare.

be the newspaper that you want to see in the world
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:24 PM on February 27 [8 favorites]

> ^^ the most lowercase of bombastic lowercase pronouncements :)

oh i have not yet begun to lowercase, you have no idea how lowercase these pronouncements could become
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:25 PM on February 27 [15 favorites]

Poetry thrives in all sorts of places (lyrics, zines, spoken word, slam, etc.), but putting it in newspapers isn't going to do anything to increase its overall uptake. That's leaving aside the breadth and complexity of the poetry that is, like a vast amount of literary fiction in the U.S., produced in and for the academy. Also left aside is the large number of poetry journals, some with long runs and some with short, that have nothing to do with the academy and just... are out there quietly publishing. The Olde Dudes didn't have to compete with the modern media ecosystem, so, yeah, Kipling.2024 is not generally winning vs. cross-platform AAA video games or whatever.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:26 PM on February 27 [3 favorites]

If you're suggesting that video games should incorporate more poetry, I'm behind you in that.
posted by hippybear at 4:28 PM on February 27 [4 favorites]

I don't usually quibble about this, but this is an exceptionally poorly-written piece. Each sentence sounds kind of like the first sentence of an undergraduate essay trying to bite off more than it can chew, i.e. "since the beginning of time," or "during the entire 19th century" or some nonsense.

As cupcakeninja says above, there's no endgame in bolstering one form of irrelevant media (print newspapers) with another (poetry).* That's maybe putting it overly nastily, but those two forms have always had different functions, as some fairly famous poets have noted.

*: No kidding I actually think that poetry is super relevant to pretty much everything and will happily die on that hill but I don't think putting a sidebar that's like "here, read a poem" in the Post is gonna serve that aim.
posted by lorddimwit at 5:06 PM on February 27 [7 favorites]

I'd wager more people under 40 read poetry than read newspapers. Poetry is pretty huge on Instagram and Tik Tok. Rupi Kaur has 5 million followers. Her poetry isn't good, but then again neither is most poetry.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 5:08 PM on February 27 [10 favorites]

There is a certain strain of popular doggerel available on FB, old forums, and some newspaper letter columns. Is it not poetry because it sucks?
posted by Countess Elena at 5:11 PM on February 27 [4 favorites]

The thing is that launching a new build system in a programming ecosystem is hard, especially one as chaotic as Python’s.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:14 PM on February 27 [11 favorites]

I agree absolutely wholeheartedly that modern newspapers should publish poetry. Where I live, it has actually been done until the last five years or so, and it definitely has a long tradition, as long as newspapers have existed here.

But also, segway as a malapropism! What a world we live in. That such a weird ass thing that briefly existed, or maybe still exists somehow, that’s inventor maybe died driving one off a cliff, can accidentally be inserted as a gyroscopically smooth transition, sliding from one thought to the next! Is it even wrong?!?!?!!
posted by snofoam at 5:14 PM on February 27 [5 favorites]

as a counterproposal i present the idea that poetry journals should cover news

I give you Poems of the Week at Light (which I'm nearly positive I found out about here at MetaFilter).
posted by kristi at 5:21 PM on February 27 [3 favorites]

How did poetry manage to fall down the stairs of relevance?

Because so much new poetry is just badly written.
posted by ITravelMontana at 5:41 PM on February 27 [6 favorites]

I'll add that during the period when I swerved out of my "I am a writer" lane and contemplated the "but what if a poet" lane, I studied with the late David Citino. He liked to write poems about the news, and sometimes had his students do the same. They inevitably tended to have an "occasional" feel, which I think was kind of the point--transient, like the news.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:51 PM on February 27 [3 favorites]

Limericks for the people
posted by fluttering hellfire at 6:06 PM on February 27 [2 favorites]

I can't stop thinking about this piece! Like, the second sentence putting Wordsworth, Milton and Dickinson in one box marked Western Canon. I mean, it's not wrong--there is a canon, these three are in it--but aside from the fact that they wrote poems, what do they possibly have in common? And this bit! "There is an air of complexity that envelops poetry, making it appear intimidating and puzzling to anyone who lacks experience with this writing style." No! That is not how it works! There's easy poetry and harder poetry and hard poetry, but there's nothing about the fact of a poem that suggests its complexity, you actually have to read it to find out! AND! How do you skip from modernism (of which you only apparently have two examples, one of whom, Woolf, is not even really someone you think of as a poet) to today, skipping over an entire human lifetime's worth of poetry? (And like, if we are going to skip ahead to a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, why Margaret Atwood? I wouldn't say anything against her poetry--her collection Dearly is on the shelf behind me--but again, like with Woolf, couldn't you find any other modern poets to make your case?)
posted by mittens at 6:07 PM on February 27 [12 favorites]

So I have not even read the article, but prompted by mittens' comment above, I have now skimmed it -

As mittens said,

There's easy poetry and harder poetry and hard poetry, but there's nothing about the fact of a poem that suggests its complexity, you actually have to read it to find out!

which immediately made me think of a couple of my favorite living poets, Wendy Cope and Carol Ann Duffy - Wendy Cope's work can be so delightfully accessible. Surely there's nothing intimidating or puzzling about The Orange ...

... and thinking of Cope and Duffy immediately reminded me that I HAVE seen their work in newspapers. (Or at least in the online version of a major newspaper.) The Guardian runs poetry all the time. Here's a bunch of poetry in The Guardian:

Two sonnets for Shakespeare 400, Wendy Cope
love sonnets for the 21st century, 8 different poets, including Wendy Cope
Phases of the Moon / Things I Have Done, Ella Frears
Shard, Ella Duffy
The First Geniuses, Billy Collins

Apparently, for a while, The Saturday Poem was a regular feature in the Guardian.

So at least one newspaper does, indeed, feature poetry frequently, and I bet there are others as well. (For example: Detroit Free Press, LA Times.)
posted by kristi at 7:22 PM on February 27 [8 favorites]

I feel bad that I'm a professor of literature and have never, ever liked poetry. Put the same feelings in a narrative paragraph, and I'll absolutely read/listen, though. No real idea why. I'm not a big hip-hop fan, but I recognize it as certainly more vibrant/authentic than most of what poetry I end up being forced to read or hear.

Because the thing that blocks me from relating to poetry more than anything else is Poetry Voice. That kind of slow, rounded, pretentious/portentious speech... it's like nails on a chalkboard. Speak like Dr. Octagon or MF DOOM, and I'll give it a shot.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:28 PM on February 27 [8 favorites]

I am a bit angry that the one of the only bits of modern long form poetry I've tried to engage with was Danielewski's Only Revolutions [Wikipedia], which never truly grabbed me, despite maybe 5 attempts at it.

And I guess, several years ago sitting at wallabear's bedside as he was dying, I realized that if you're going to go visit someone who is dying, you need to take a volume of Dickenson with you. Because the words run out really really quickly, but just having words to give voice to can mean so much.

So the next time I end up next to a dying loved one, I will take Dickenson with me to read aloud.
posted by hippybear at 7:32 PM on February 27 [4 favorites]

This is just to say

I have tossed
poetry
down the stairs
of relevance
forgive me
it was unpublished
and had taken
a back seat to prose

posted by mmoncur at 7:35 PM on February 27 [18 favorites]

> Because the thing that blocks me from relating to poetry more than anything else is Poetry Voice. That kind of slow, rounded, pretentious/portentious speech... it's like nails on a chalkboard. Speak like Dr. Octagon or MF DOOM, and I'll give it a shot.

okay but what if instead of poetry voice as you describe it or half shark alligator half man poetry was just a bunch of clauses all piled up together maybe linked with "and" — what's the word for this is it parataxis i can't remember if it's parataxis i want it to be parataxis — i think i remember reading something about how whatever it's called it's a common feature both in stories that kids tell and also in like homer also there could be some phrases or words that get repeated over and over again with little variation (this establishes the rhythm and heightens that little kid slash homer feel that if you do it right keeps anyone from ever telling if you're being very serious or very silly or both) but this is really important what if it always must be grammatically correct or close to it especially when the repetitions are happening and especially especially when everything blurs together into one big long sentence, and because it's just a bunch of clauses all heaped up together maybe linked with and this is the important part you end up with something that cannot be read in poetry voice like not at all because if you write this way you end up reading it (either out loud or with the voice in your head) you start it reading faster and faster and everything comes out all breathless in a way that sounds nothing like poetry voice but instead sounds like the Internet or at least the Internet as it sounds in my head does the Internet sound that way to other people because the Internet sounds that way to me add line breaks if you want?
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:59 PM on February 27 [10 favorites]

Agreed that poetry out loud works better than poetry on the page for me, I just took a longish walk while listening to the Between the Covers interview with Pádraig Ó Tuama (transcript) and oh oh oh it was a joy to hear. I think I fell in love with poetry because of slam poets, first, and then had been ushered into poetry at large by hearing Yusef Komunyakaa read.

I also agree that poetry voice can be annoying but really it is the literary reading intonation overall that can sound so... so overmuch. Here's a fun article about "poet voice."

as a literature prof [lead author of this study analyzing 100 poets] was subjected to plenty of Poet Voice... “I just felt like there was a style of poetry reading that I was hearing a lot that sounded highly conventional and stylized,” she says... That led to a 2016 article in which she looked at the possible origins of the “vocal cliché,” finding that it had elements of religious ritual and also inherited some of academia’s abhorrence for the theatrical.

In the new study, she wanted to describe what, exactly, makes up the voice. Choosing sound clips of 50 poets born before 1960 and 50 born after that date, MacArthur and her co-authors ran 60- second clips of well-known poets reading their works through algorithms that looked for 12 traits, including reading speed, length of pauses, rhythmic complexity and pitch changes. They also did the same for a control group of people from Ohio just talking normally about sports, the weather and traffic.

Compared to the control group, two main attributes of Poet Voice jumped out. First, the poets spoke very slowly and kept their voice in a narrow pitch range, meaning they didn’t display much emotion. Second, 33 percent of the poets engaged in long pauses, up to 2 seconds, which normal talkers rarely if ever used.

...“In a more natural conversational intonation pattern, you vary your pitch for emphasis depending on how you feel about something,” MacArthur tells Giaimo. “In this style of poetry reading, those idiosyncrasies … get subordinated to this repetitive cadence. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, you just say it in the same way.”

posted by spamandkimchi at 8:02 PM on February 27 [6 favorites]

Muh name's po-8
It make me sad
People think
I writin bad

But though I can
Language abuse
Muh po-8-try
Still liks the nooz
posted by Joey Michaels at 8:53 PM on February 27 [8 favorites]

So, I don't have kids and worked in an elementary school in the early Nineties but have not had much mingling with children since then, and I'm left to wonder... who is the Shel Silverstein for today? And there were more modern popular kids poets when I was in that school whose names I'm forgetting, but they existed then... And I assume that every ten years there's a new Very Popular Kid's Poet...

Who is the Popular Kid's Poet now?
posted by hippybear at 8:59 PM on February 27 [2 favorites]

Julia Donaldson isn't bad
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 10:16 PM on February 27 [1 favorite]

Because so much new poetry is just badly written.

--Some poet probably, 1957, 1921, 1895, 1722, 1401, 1169, 272BCE,etc, etc
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:33 AM on February 28 [6 favorites]

Came for "this is just to say" and a bredlik. Leaving satisfied.
posted by JohnFromGR at 4:21 AM on February 28

Poetry in newspapers would be fine as an end in itself, but I struggle with it as a way to expose people to current events. Poems are not reliable places where words mean what they seem, and when interpretation is invited for the most fundamental details I think any informational value becomes almost exclusively subjective, personal, noncommittal.

I come in and out of reading and enjoying the stuff. I have developed rules that make me nope right out (any poem that uses the words poem, poet, poetry is already 99% of the way to me putting it down) but I'll break those rules on occasion.

In terms of relevance, though, I think that's not true to say poetry has fallen down the stairs. Maybe it's a semantic thing, but I still know a lot of songs by heart and can recite them on demand. They are what comes to mind when I think about experiences of extreme emotional potency. They are tattooed onto me.

London Underground has a nice campaign that puts poems or fragments of them into spaces normally occupied by advertising. While going through a sad breakup last year, I read this little one on the tube and really had to contain myself while it sunk in (and then I bought the book). Which is to say that this kind of writing is very relevant to personal events, maybe less reliably so for current events:

Long Exposure

Even after letting go
of the last bird
I hesitate

There is something
in this empty cage
that never gets released

·Garous Abdolmalekian
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 4:30 AM on February 28 [3 favorites]

Poetry rhymes and has a rhythm so you can remember it. With our current technology and our current fear of performing in public there isn't really a place in our lives to carry around meaningful words. Right now we memorize and recite meme captions, because those are the flashpoints for ideas we can share with other people. I don't think the people around us would have the patience to listen to us recite a limerick, let alone a sonnet. Poetry has gone the way of amateur chorale singing. It can't complete with our media.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:44 AM on February 28 [1 favorite]

newer art forms such as … music

???
posted by mbrubeck at 6:55 AM on February 28 [3 favorites]

I feel deeply uncomfortable about this article, because for the life of me I do not know the author's age or what their literary background is. The literary history is simply...wrong? Yes, there was a cadre of mostly-late Victorian poets and critics who were seriously arguing for poetry as a site of religious experience. No, John Martin, who painted The Bard in 1817, was not one of those people--in fact, he is best known for his gigantic Biblical and apocalyptic paintings--nor is The Bard representative of that trend (it's a response to a then decades-old fascination with Celtic bardic and minstrel verse). Anna Barbauld is not a Victorian poet, and while there are many things to be said about "Goblin Market," a straightforward commentary on Victorian gender roles it is not. Rudyard Kipling (Rudyard Kipling?!) was not disseminating "information." Virginia Woolf is out of place in this discussion. Etc.

Publishing poetry in newspapers was a thing. It was a major thing, in fact: if you were a nineteenth-century poet, publishing in newspapers, periodicals, and (until they went out of fashion) literary annuals was a much more reliable way of seeing print than volume form. I would think that taking advantage of contemporary media would be the more logical way to think about publishing venues for poetry?
posted by thomas j wise at 7:19 AM on February 28 [3 favorites]

For a bit of levity: ee cummings:

"i like, slowly stroking the,shocking fuzz
of your electric furr,and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh….And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new"

That's just Maroon 5/Adam Levine lyrics, and that's not a high bar, poetically or lyrically. Poetry hasn't gone anywhere. Should that be in the newspaper? Sure, whatever.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:45 AM on February 28 [2 favorites]

this is an exceptionally poorly-written piece

I couldn't agree more, and honestly if it didn't have the "segway" typo in it I would think it was LLM output.
posted by whir at 9:48 AM on February 28 [2 favorites]

Should Modern Newspapers Publish Poetry?

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

- William Carlos Williams
posted by neuron at 3:31 PM on February 28 [3 favorites]

guys not only is poetry alive and well it's actually one of the most dominant forms of expressionin the entire world (and has been for some time). the only difference is that it's called "rap music" now.
posted by UlfMagnet at 5:26 PM on February 28

it's called "rap music" now

Okay, so, I have a question, now that this sentiment has come up a few times. At some point, songs and poetry became detached from one another, and became distinct entities--nobody's sitting around singing sonnets, for instance. But surely that happened long before the development of modern 'poetry voice.' So...when did it happen? When did a poem become something distinct from singing?
posted by mittens at 5:34 PM on February 28

My Gen Z & Millennial relatives enjoy the poetry of folks like Rupi Kaur, Maggie Smith, and the late great Mary Oliver - just to name a few.
posted by edithkeeler at 6:03 PM on February 28

This seems a good place to recommend Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast. This has helped me appreciate a lot of poetry I'd either never heard of or never managed to get to grips with before. Until I heard his episode on The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufrock, for example, I'd never understood a word of TS Eliot's stuff.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:07 AM on February 29 [3 favorites]

Tom Hiddleston reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
posted by edithkeeler at 10:53 AM on February 29

Poems probably came first, before prose or song or almost anything recognizable as modern human linguistic communication. Prehistoric people didn't just start narrating stories one day. It was a slow process, surely, and no doubt for many years, for many generations of people, the absolute pinnacle of spoken word communication was no more than:

Grog light fire.
Fire warm heart.

All of this writing and speaking and reasoning and talking and narrating and rapping... it all sits on top of the human ability to craft and understand poems.
posted by grog at 10:15 AM on March 1

Metafilter's own mathowie writes about the YouTube video Poems Aren't Riddles.

This video reframed the entire concept of poetry for me in a very good, life-changing way. A poem is simply capturing a moment and a feeling. It's a glimpse into the author's experiences.

Enjoy poems in the same way you enjoy a photograph or a song, without the puzzle or riddle aspects coursing through your mind. Instead, let a poem transport you to the moment and that author's experience so you can feel it too. That's all.

posted by Nelson at 1:37 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]