The day the world stopped caring about poetry was the day it lost its soul.
I believe this because I went through the same cycle.
At first, I liked poetry for all the wrong reasons. English was my best subject in school and I thought memorizing poetry made me seem special. It was my ploy to convince the teachers that I was unnaturally gifted at English because I could actually decipher the weird half-sentences and short-word images that other kids called lame.
When I got to college, I tried getting ahead (and getting head) by reciting poetry and affecting the same pretensions that got me As in high school. It didn’t work. Not only did it make me into an un-layable creep, but it also did absolutely nothing for my grades. So I joined the world of people who think poetry is lame. Maybe the rhyming couplets and iambic pentameters had been real doublet-undoers in Shakespeare’s time, but by the 2000s, poetry itself was the undoable mistake.
My mistake was to project onto poetry my own pretentiousness and materialism. If poetry couldn’t give me things the way other forms of communication could, then it was useless. Like so much of modern capitalism, the thinking was, “if it isn’t monetizable, then it isn’t worth spending time on.”
But poetry is worth spending time on precisely because great poetry isn’t about the emotionless accumulation of wealth. You can’t focus group a haiku to perfection, or write a brief for a ballad. There’s no seed funding for a sonnet subscription service. Nor should there be. Great poetry can’t be written to make money, and that’s what makes it great. As far as capitalism is concerned, your opinion about an award-winning poem is about as valid as that of the judges, since that poem likely isn’t going to be optioned into a blockbuster mega-feature directed by Tarantino. It will forever be some lines on paper, a recording on Youtube at best.
What makes any poem valuable is what it does for you.
As far as your soul is concerned, a great poem can make all the difference. The thing with great poets is that they are conveying something outside of the rationally observable and so they must tell it in non-prose format. The end result is something approaching a mystical encounter with the Tao, a resonance that is felt on a deeper level than prose could ever penetrate. The poet writing in that state of being, you reading and experiencing that same indescribable state… You get each other.
Poems can convey the quiet melancholy of an evening turning into dawn. They can capture pure unadulterated wonder. The shock of grief. The beauty of a single moment or the awe of an entire eon passing. Poems can take us to realms our logical minds cannot fathom. Places we’ve forgotten even exist.
In the same way that meditation has gone from a method of understanding one’s divine presence to a means of improving sleep and productivity, poetry today seems to be less concerned with inexpressible truths and more about pure performance. Not that there is anything wrong with spoken word or other traditions of performative poetry, after all, poets were once thought of as shamans, their lyrics repeated as incantations. But the trend to reduce everything sacred into “entertainment” and the desire to make it marketable has led to beautiful poets who don’t say much.
I read somewhere once the advice that one should only write poetry when one is moved to do so. Perhaps our lack of appreciation of poetry is the result of late-stage capitalism moving us to do not much else besides making money.
At least in Ezra Pound’s day, the greatest enemy to poetry was glory. Instead of sitting around and giving expression to the smell of the roses, people were supposed to achieve high deeds for humanity by dying on battlefields, curing incurable diseases, or “making advancements" in ways beneficial to the empire. It smacks of the same unrealistic expectations we place today on kids to found startups or become super athletes or otherwise “be successful”, without pausing to consider that the successful people may not have succeeded because they were pushed to do great things, but because they did what they loved. Pound answered this nonsense of heroism and success with his poem, “An Immortality”:
Sing we for love and idleness,
Naught else is worth the having.
Though I have been in many a land,
There is naught else in living.
And I would rather have my sweet,
Though rose-leaves die of grieving,
Than do high deeds in Hungary °
To pass all men's believing.
Time to reconsider just what exactly is “worth the having”.
<But the trend to reduce everything sacred into “entertainment” and the desire to make it marketable has led to beautiful poets who don’t say much.>
<It smacks of the same unrealistic expectations we place today on kids to found startups or become super athletes or otherwise “be successful”…>
These two observations are related. We associate entertainment with success rather than inner pursuit or contribution to culture and thought. We've let business, money, and popularity become our currency: few remember the real values of good artistic work.