We don’t read poetry. Understand why and you understand everything wrong with us as a society.

Why read poetry? If you glance at the absence of poetry and the absence of significant or influential poets in our society you would get the impression that poetry as an art form is something vestigial and irrelevant. Yet we live in a time when culture has never been more abundant, we are bombarded with music, television, constantly absorbing the written word in social media, news media, articles, headlines. Poetry it seems is everywhere and nowhere. Why don’t we flock to hear what the latest poet has to say? Why do poets not voice us as a society?

One reason is that poetry has a stubborn refusal to be reduced to the hedonistic or epistemic valences of other forms of culture. In other words it isn’t easily packaged and sold. Music culture relies on the emotional gratifications of music and our obsession with celebrity, we are sold sounds as people, we buy into music as identity, even if we know how shallow and cynical it is. Even if not, music has a kind of pleasure that can be bottled and sold over and over, it can exist in a relatively artless form and still be consumed. But with the exception of some instagram poets such as Rubi Kaur who is probably not in a strict sense writing poetry, it seems you can’t sell poetry like music.