Richard Nash: The Future of Poetry.
The single most popular form of communication in the world right now, and for the foreseeable future, is speech. The next most popular is email (10 trillion non-spam messages in 2011), and the third is the SMS text message (1 trillion non-spam messages). What more fertile circumstances for the propagation of poetry?
Yet there is a pervasive assumption, in most of the West at least, that poetry is dying. Poetry books don’t sell, poets don’t make money, it’s the punchline in joke after joke about penury. Establishment literary culture bemoans the philistinism of American culture, and the Poetry Foundation, after getting a massive, $100-million-at-the-time-since-diminished-due-to-financial-bubble-burst donation from pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly, spent a wee chunk of it bribing public television to do some spots on how poetry isn’t really that unpopular, always a sign of the truly unpopular thing, when people spent money persuading you it’s otherwise.
Poetry is going the way of opera, it’s assumed.
Of ballet.
It is hard to pinpoint the basis of this perception, especially because it is completely wrong. Poetry is in rude health, even if every sign of ill-health I offered above is true. Poetry books don’t sell very well, but they never did. Poets mostly do not make much money, but neither do knitters and no-one thinks knitting is dying off. Establishment literary culture wouldn’t function if it had to operate in a state of sunny optimism; it is Cassandra-like in its very being. Without barbarians at the gate, who would let them run the city. And it is the sad truth with any given nonprofit that while the worst thing for it is to have no money, the next worst thing is to have too much money, it goes in search of a purpose. So yes, poetry doesn’t sell, and poetry denizens castigate a culture they believe has turned its back on them.So what, then, is “killing” poetry, if we are to believe it is dying? Ebooks are hurting independent bookstores, long seen as guardian of poetry. Google is making us stupid and shallow and unwilling to read anything more than a LOLcat caption, Facebook and Twitter compel us to read and write about cats.
It’s the internet, isn’t it, that’s destroying poetry?
No.
The greatest impediment to poetry is not technology: the printing press begat more poetry, not less; the industrial revolution produced more poetry, not less; the 20th century book supply chain replete with wholesalers and tens of thousands of bookstores worldwide engendered more poetry, not less; the web allowed more poetry to be hosted, not less; web2.0 sparked more conversation around poetry, not less; hell even the great scourge of our times spam has produced more poetry by offering poets found texts in the same way the Surrealists and the Beats used the detritus of popular communication of the time as raw material for their work.
(I find myself continually remarking upon the astonishing power of human imagination—in this case our capacity to undo and remake language so as to express some intensity of experience—combined with our equally astonishing inability to comprehend the implications of the imagination, that is, given my own powers of imagination, one must surely assume these powers are universal, that children, adolescents, bankers, homeless persons, and Grandad can all create poetry.)
