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Is Poetry Dying? Once, poetry was a popular art form. What happened?
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Accessible recorded music has taken the place that poetry used to have in people's lives. 150 years ago someone would walk down the street mumbling a line of Longfellow, whereas now it would be the lyrics of a popular song. I don't think modernism can be completely blamed - modernism transformed literature as well, but popular novels with more traditional narratives and style continue to be published and widely read.
If anything, poetry has been making a comeback in the last 10 years as attention spans dwindle from social media. A short poem can fit into an instagram post. Whether any of that poetry is good is a different question.
Sounds like the medium changed.
People are buying spoken word poetry set to a beat rather than printed.
People going over their rap lyrics is something I often hear while on the street and that's fucking awesome. I once got a voice-mail at 2 a.m. (misdial, obv.) that was just a long rap verse. It makes me feel hopeful that kids are engaging so deeply in language. Good rap is very respectable poetry and we, as poets and readers, should stay open to all poetic forms.
I saw a guy at an open mic absolutely slay the audience with his spoken word.
I work at a middle-of-nowhere community college. A few months ago, I was walking across campus and overheard three students bantering in apparently impromptu rap lyrics in a way that sounded straight out of a Shakespearean play. They were playing off of each other's puns and poking fun at each other all while keeping the same cadence and staying on theme.
Maybe it was memorized and they were going over something for a performance, but it really seemed off-the-cuff to me. It blew my mind.
Not just rap lyrics, many singer/songwriters would have been poetry peeps 100 years ago.
Early Taylor Swift, Jack Johnson, Bug Hunter(Dear McCracken guy), Lenka, Rachel Platten, Meiko, etc. are some examples of non rappers. Not to mention the more eccentric bunch like Amanda Palmer or Jack White that definitely would have fit in to a beatnick coffee shop.
And let's not forget one of Canada's former poet laureates Leonard Cohen. Perhaps best known for "that song from Shrek", likely one of the best-selling poets to ever come out of the frozen north.
Mitski is my favorite poetic musician. Many of her songs read just like poems.
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taylor’s two recent albums Folklore and Evermore are very poetic!
One joke I made at a poetry reading is that even a terrible poem could be a good rock song (referencing Jim Morrison). But great lyricists like Neko Case, Joni Mitchell, Smokey Robinson, Prince, Leonard Cohen, etc. sound good even without music. Amen to Amanda Palmer and Jack White!
Yeah, the upcoming generation has a lot more intense code switching on a day to day basis, and so far studies are showing that increases overall linguistic skills, which is pretty neat. I wrote a paper related to this years ago about 1773 Sp34k being a functional pidgin (a language that pops up when people from different culture’s need to communicate, it usually has loose to no grammatical rules and relies on phrases and words from a lot of different languages.) I saw counter strike and world of Warcraft as kind of the locus of creation for this pidgin, and I think part of the reason that 1337 speak isn’t so much a thing anymore is because we have so many different online games and communities now. If you were a gamer in the 00’s, you most likely played ONE of those games, those were the “big island” where the language was refined. There just isn’t any community with that kind of percentage of player base pull anymore.
You could make a very similar argument now with memes! A commonly understood meme or reference can cross language barriers and convey a phrase or concept directly to the audience. It's that Star Trek episode again. It might be imprecise, but using common images like DiCaprio pointing at the TV or Michael Jackson eating popcorn still work without using words.
hungry complete voiceless safe jar recognise fertile smoggy squeal sophisticated -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
Is this something I’m unfamiliar with or just a typo?
Man, I'd love a random misdialed rap voicemail!
More like changed back. My English professor would say that most older poetry was meant to be recited, not just read. Kind of like Shakespeare’s plays.
Agreed! Especially with hip hop and rap’s continued success in the music industry. All song lyrics are a form of poetry, but rap has a concentrated focus on lyricism and rhythm that really brings out the poetics. It wouldn’t surprise me if the rising popularity of rap is related to people’s shortened attention spans, allowing for the continued consumption of poetry due to the music keeping people’s attention longer.
I'm not convinced attention spans are shortening. That feels like old man nonsense to make people feel better about how things used to be.
It really has been. It's been studied. Tiktok is the worst offender when it comes to the impact on attention span.
No, this has been an empirically studied thing for quite some time. Hell, it's been happening to me.
You clearly haven't been paying attention. Bombarded with hundreds of stories, entertainment, news, images, short video reels, literally within 60 seconds. Sitting through a movie, a meal, or a coffee with friends without checking the phone is near impossible for most people. Nothing like it has even come close to what mobile devices are doing to us. It's a complete re-wiring of the brain. Old men too.
150 years ago 20% of the American population was illiterate. Not that you have to be literate to recite poetry, that's part of the point of it, but I don't think it's accurate to blame music for replacing an artform that, even in 1870, would have been sought after by people of a certain class and education. People walking down the street would more likely be singing a song, which I assure you has also been around for about as long as poetry.
I find it weird that your comment is buried so far down. This.. makes sense? The working classes would definitely not be quoting poetry beyond basic limericks.
I don’t think it’s taken it’s place, I think most good songs ARE poetry. They just have a good back beat, I think if Taylor swift was born 200 years ago she would have been a poet. Jim Morrison did a lot of poetry, a lot of musicians are poets too. Rappers too, going to a jam poetry season isn’t any different than a poetry reading, it’s just the rap version.
Yep. Poetry is alive and well, it's just called rap now.
Here's a quote from Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney from 2003:
Or Elliot Smith, Conor Oberst-- I'm sure there's some country singers who are amazing poets too, though that's not my cup of tea genre-wise
Yeah, having a side discussion in another thread. Will be forever weirded out people think rhyming words set to music and a beat started in America in the 80's or whatever.
Even your reply kinda prioritises a certain type of style of song. As though Trent Reznor singing Hurt isn't a poem, but when Johnny Cash does it in country it is. I mean, I get it, it's not like I don't think of say, early Cure as "poetic" due to the goth sensibility, but even the shittiest pop song has rhyming couplets.
I mean Kendrick Lamar’s entire discography has a comprised of some of the best poetry I’ve read. And when I was younger my first real introduction was through Tupac Shakur’s poetry book.
TPAB honestly should’ve won a Pulitzer so complex yet accessible.
Not sure if you brought up Pulitzer because you know this and think it also should have won, but he did win one for DAMN.
Yeah I saw that but honestly I don think that album should’ve won it. Still pretty damn good, but Imo it is nothing on TPAB
Aesop Rock for me, but Kdot is great too!
Other genres have poetry as well.
There is a tech death album called Odyssey to the West, multiple spoken word sections with amazing emotion, even all the harsh vocals have incredibly poetic lyrics.
They also have a prequel called Odyssey to the Gallows where all lyrics are pretty much spoken word poetry
Interesting! We have rhythm and meter in both poetry and music. I certainly find songs in my head when hiking, to keep the rhythm. Annabel Lee and other Poe-etry might be considered to rock along in 6/8 time. Do you think poetry requires uncommon breadth of exposure to experience and literature so we readers can recognize the references , analogies and metaphors the poet is using?
Check out Robert Service work. He was the poet of the Yukon Gold Rush. In the past, poems like Little Breeches by Hay, the Highwayman, Paul Revere's Ride, Gunga Din by Kipling were hugely popular. They are not intellectual poems.
More literary but still accessible to read, are poets like Wilfred Owen and Sassoon who wrote poems about their WWI service experience.
Part of the problem in my opinion is the way poetry is taught in school. We don't start a pianist or violinist or guitarist by teaching exclusively theory. But teachers start with rhyme schemes and symbols when they could be starting with poems that rhythmically tell compelling stories. To generate poetry fans you need to share poems that cause enthusiasm.
I 100% agree with this. One of my favorite books as a child was Where The Sidewalk Ends, and I remember hating poetry units in school, since I hated the way we only talked about the least interesting parts of the poems. I suspect if it wasn’t for the pre-school exposure I probably would have just decided I didn’t like poetry then and there and really missed out.
And let's not forget Dr Seuss. I grew up on those books.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold . . .
That poem fucking slaps.
The idea of poetry as something to be written down, collected into volumes, and read silently is very much an aberration of the 18th-19th centuries when compared to most of human history. For the overwhelming majority of our past, poetry was performed aloud and set to music. Beowulf, The Iliad / Odyssey, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, etc. were all passed down orally by performers who sung them while accompanying themselves on a lyre / lute / other instrument - they were all in circulation for decades, if not centuries, before they were ever written down. If anything, the modern experience of poetry through popular song is a return to our historical tradition, rather than a deviation from it.
And also there are still tons of poets and fans hanging out in online communities or IRL communities. Some of us even buy poetry collections on occasion.
Allpoetry.com has a pretty good community
There’s also a lot of things we study as poetry that would have been set to music. For example: much of Robert Burns’ work. He’s still often studied as a poet, but he essentially wrote pop songs. Certainly doesn’t apply to all poetry, but it’s not insignificant.
I remember learning the folk song/Child ballad “Sir Patrick Spens” as a poem in high school as another example. And then things like Rudyard Kipling’s “Barracks-Room Ballads” complicated things further by publishing songs alongside poetry (although there are attestations he sang with a lot of his poetry), but without publishing sheet music with it.
Huh. That makesnamlot of sense
I think it's important to keep in mind the difference between dead and not commercially viable. Probably poetry is never again going to make anyone rich or famous but it will always be there for those when want to read or write. You can't really have a language without also having the ability to play around with it poetically.
If we want to cultivate a wider spread appreciation for poetry then we will probably have to invest in it without any expectation of a financial return. Workshops, grants, attention given to it in school curriculums and so on.
If we don't do this than maybe our poetic institutions and traditions decline in some way. it's hard to quantify what exactly we would lose and as someone whose never really spent the the time to get into the artform it's all a bit intellectual to me.
If you feel differently well I dunno, do what you can, write a poem in the replies if you like.
Did poetry ever make someone rich? Did anyone ever make bank by writing poems?
All poets I know of either did it as a second job or were aristocrats with zero need to make money from poetry. Most recent ones, 20th century onwards, were teachers or wrote for the newspaper to make ends meet. Can't recall a single one that lived off his poetry, it's just not a viable thing. You write like 50 good poems in a lifetime if you are Shakespeare...
Brazil, where I am from, has a huge poetic culture. All the greats here never lived off their poetry. They were professors (Bandeira), bureaucrats (Drummond), diplomats (Mello Neto), musicians (Vinicius), teachers (Leminski)...
20th Century also conveniently lines up with things like pre-recorded music, radio, movies and eventually television.
I don't know about making people rich prior to that, but it certainly made them famous. There are a bunch of people from the 1800s that we can name because they wrote poetry. Some of them (Lord Byron for example) were already rich when they started though.
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It existed in Europe, during the Renaissance the painters were all "patronized" by noble families, like the Medicis and the Borghesis. Da Vinci, Rafael, Michelangelo made decent money and lived comfortable lives.
I know that epic poets like Camões in Portugal also had something similar with the emperor (1500s, by the way). And some more popular ones, like Bocage, struggled to make enough money.
Bocage has a famous poem by the way, his supposed epitaph:
Here lies Bocage, the whorehound Lived a miraculous and easy life Ate, drank, and fucked without having money
Which sounds much better in Portuguese, of course:
Aqui jaz Bocage, o putanheiro Viveu vida milagrosa e folgazã Comeu, bebeu, fodeu, sem ter dinheiro
I assumed Robert frost and shel Silverstein had comfortable lives but I dunno for sure.
Edit: a cursory Google shows Silverstein at $20 Mil.
Silverstein might be a good example, there is an interesting case for writing children's books and making bank, even in poetry form. I guess it has to do with the value of the IP, famous characters and all that. Though that is more a US thing, never heard of a millionaire poet here in Brazil. The closest is Vinicius de Moraes, he wrote the lyrics to The Girl from Ipanema. But he was a composer and musician, so I am not sure it counts as "poetry".
Frost wasn't poor by any means as well, but hard to say how much he made from his poetry.
Do people like John Cooper Clarke count?
In the US, when your poetry is very well-received, you can break into academia and live a very comfortable life. You won't be rich, but you can be very solidly upper-middle class. It's a cushy life.
We’re still talking a couple hundred people at most, though. And look for that number to diminish if we continue the current toxic combination of breathtakingly expensive tuition and emphasis on STEM-only education.
And even he wasn't getting rich off poems.
Songwriting is poetry. Rapping is poetry. People have become millionaires off of poetry all the time. The music industry alone is a billion dollar industry. Just because folks prefer it to be spoken and not just written doesn't make it any les poetry.
To boot, songwriters are poets as well. Plenty of them make bank off of their poetry as well. One even wrote a great poem about how they weren't going to just write a love poem just because someone else demanded it of them right away and it made bank. Folks have to realize poetry exists in many forms and is still alive today.
That seems like a dangerously broad definition of poetry, though. Things constructed with words aren't automatically poems. You're describing song lyrics and music. The fact that they are designed with and for music distinguishes them.
I'd argue that being able to work purely as verse, without melodic accompaniment, distinguishes poetry.
Many things work as both, of course - slam poetry, rap, and hip-hop frequently straddle the line - but not all songs are poems. Tons of song lyrics totally fall apart when separated from the music they they were designed for.
Love this perspective. I’d also add that more than maybe any other genre, poetry is very difficult to fake. It’s only real substance is word and meaning. Music and fiction and drawing can all present the artifice of substance, but poetry without soul is just… obviously terrible, even to non-poets. So when art is all under the gun to be as profitable as possible, poetry has a hard time faking it.
There’s a perspective that a “post-religious” society is historically identical to a “pre-religious” society and I think there’s something to be said the same for poetry. Language gets stagnant without poetry. Rilke and Heidegger both attest that when a culture loses its sense of self, poets stand the special task of reaching into the night to find the things we still hold sacred and beautiful. And that the less a culture values poetry, the more dire the role of the poet becomes.
What do you mean? There are tons of pretentious and bad poems that are deemed artistic or are widely popular. It's not any harder to fake than music, paintings, etc.
Idk dude I just say shit on the internet sometimes
Wow. From the article:
"A freshman dorm mate won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry nearly a decade ago. His book sold, according to the last count that I saw, 353 copies."
This has always amazed me. I have a couple self-published books on Amazon. One of my books shows up on Amazon as a "Top 10" of it's category. It sold 3 copies in 2022. I don't understand how that works at all. I really don't even remember picking a category to be niche, just clicking some dropdowns when self-publishing it. To top it all off, I think my 3 copies in 2022 got me $1.12 USD.
Edit: They are books of poetry.
Amazon intentionally makes a lot of really obscure and specific top ten categories, specifically because it helps get people to buy them. I'm guessing they are generated algorithmically which can lead to wonky stuff at low volume
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Bulgarian screen door repair kit poetry is an underrated genre.
You gonna drop us some links to your books?
For me personally, I think this is the big one. Wages being what they are, I don't perceive that I'll get as much value from a book of poems as I will from a story.
Then there's that bit in the article about poets being given permission to write without rhyme, rhythm, meter etc. and personally I feel that. I have admittedly read very little poetry outside of sprog here on reddit, but what little I do consume just reads like a weirdly broken up paragraph.
If you look at modern poetry such as by Rupi Kaur or Florence Welch, it's pretty much that. There are exceptions though. Amanda Gorman comes to mind. Her poetry follows a more traditional metric and is still widely successful.
Even among modern poets writing write free verse, Kaur is unpopular for doing nothing but enjambing single sentences (two or three if you're lucky). Good poets can still use line breaks to create affect, rhythm is still something considered in good free verse even if it's not a strict meter, and there are dozens of other poetic devices one can use without writing to a set form.
Most people think free verse is just writing whatever you want and adding line breaks. Good free verse still follows some kind of form, still works within constraints, still employs poetic devices. The soundplay, the specific uses of consonants and vowels, the deliberate enjambments, the immediacy and elevation of the language…
There’s more to poetry than the end-rhyme.
According to Kaur that's only because white people can't judge her art.
Wikipedia : Kaur feels that her work can't be "fully reviewed or critiqued through a white lens or a Western one"
Edit: provided source
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Yes! I like Amanda Gorman’s poetry. She said in an interview that her inspiration comes from words she hears on streets from everyday people. I think that’s an intelligent way of mixing modern life into traditional poetry.
She may be the only living non-musical poet I'm aware of, and that's thanks to Biden's inauguration. My wife has a canvas with a snippet from her speech/poem on the wall in her office at work.
The content of "The Hill We Climb" really was inspiring, but in my mind it was the lyricism and musicality of the spoken form that made it much more memorable than your standard political speech or sermon.
Which gets back to the root question and all the popular answers. Today's poets are performers, too, and the best medium for decades has been with a musical accompaniment.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/
Lots of poems on there, both contemporary and not, to be read or in audio form, and essays (and it's free!).
I'm prepared to weather a blizzard of downvotes but this is the first account I block whenever I create a new account.
I genuinely don't understand the appeal
It's like I said, lots of the poetry I do end up consuming reads like weirdly broken paragraphs. Sprog writes about random stuff in reddit threads that has a good flow, and rhymes. It's impressive the way some people are able to rap about random subjects in the moment.
Thank you! Not trying to be mean but he frequently pops up in totally inappropriate threads hijacking a top comment with his inane schtick. Most of the other novelty accounts have had the decency to hang it up. Enough already lol.
Aaand now that's a front page TIL post
Recorded music happened. Poetry is still an extremely popular art form, it just usually is only one part of the performance now -- the vocal track.
Leonard Cohen's kind of an interesting case in point. Well respected writer and poet; but Dylan changed the game for songwriting as an outlet for popular, poetic expression and allowed folks of that ilk to make more money.
I'm a poet.
I know it.
Hope I don't blow it.
-Bob Dylan
Dylan would have been priceless if his voice didn't sound like a beaten cat.
For me, that is part of the appeal. Dylan covers with a clean vokal track doesnt really capture it.
A Nobel Prize-winning cat.
Listen, homie. I would elect that Nobel Prize-winning cat as God Emperor, but his voice still sounds like a beaten cat.
That's a new type of poetry. Poetry set to music is also a thing and pretty different to just being a vocal track. Which I guess is also a new type of poetry.
I guess I'm saying that poetry hasn't been "consumed" by music. Instead new types of poetry came along and ended up pretty popular.
The Iliad was set to music most likely - people seem to forget that.
Also there is probably a pretty good chance that each time it got told it was told slightly differently.
Hello, PhD in Contemporary American Poetry here. I just read this article, and wanted to explain why this professor in the History dept is wrong.
Poetry's "death" is brought up constantly, and has been brought up over and over again for at least the past 100 years. It usually touches on two basic premises:
There's been a deterioration in form and the excellent craft it requires - this is usually attributed to Modernist Poetry and especially Eliot (the most over-hyped poet in 20th century poetry).
People don't read it anymore and there's no more poetry celebrities, and the books don't sell or make money, and nobody can quote it (it's not popular).
Here's why these arguments are wrong.
Despite what most people think, more people are reading and writing poetry than at any point in history. The internet opened networks and distributed audiences, but there are more people doing more interesting and amazing things with poetry today than ever before.
The article mentions science and STEM - how many of you know about The Xenotext by Christian Bök, which is a project to write a poem into a DNA sequence that interrogates what it means for poetry to live past humanity's extinction.
There are so many amazing books of poetry being published by small presses too, even if the mainstream publishing houses aren't.
Hey, want to read the best book of American Poetry from the past 10 years? It was Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. It'll read like it was written this year. In 50 years, it's the book high schoolers will read to understand the 2010's. It's on Gray Wolf Press, one of the best of those small publishers working today.
And that gets us into the crux of the problem with the linked article: it almost goes out of its way to avoid mentioning poets that aren't white. I recall the briefest mentions of: Amanda Gorman, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Yusuf Komunyaaka. But even that takes a very binary white/black approach that excludes the work by Hispanic, Indigenous, and Asian American poets (even those terms are obnoxiously huge categories). So shout-out to Gloria Anzaldua, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rafael Campo, Ada Límon, Layli Long Soldier, Divya Victor, Cathy Park Hong, and all the other amazing poets who got excluded by this awful piece.
The answer to his question, by the way, about what the last poem the average person would recognize is, is "Harlem" by Langston Hughes. Or is it "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron.
I mean, the way this article's claims seem to be profound at first, only for them to melt away when you consider that fact that people beyond white men write poetry, is shameful. Oh, and I'm a straight white man, it's just that I don't assume the universality of my perspective and indulge heavily in poetry by people with different backgrounds, and when you see the disparities in quality between what's being written and what's being published today, the ongoing institutional racism of the publishing industry is obvious. How many Billy Collins and Mary Oliver books must we suffer.
Oh, and by the way, Creative Writing programs are one of the few parts of the Humanities that are GROWING their departments in Universities. People want to study creative writing, including poetry. Because it's alive and thriving, if you know where to look or care enough to ask.
Thank you for saying this! I love poetry, and my favorite poets definitely are not old, white dudes (with the exception of Leonard Cohen).
Poetry isn’t dead; it’s just different.
Finally, a good response!!
Thank you.
In Nepal, we recently got a reality show for Poets called The Poet Idol. Poetry is being revived here.
Happy cake day!
Oh, thank you very much indeed.
Once, baroque was a popular style of music.
Tastes change
If it’s not baroque, don’t fix it!
Ohhhohhhohoheheheee my monocle fell out
You know you’re baroque when don’t have any Monet.
I’ll see myself out
guffaw
Mary Oliver is hugely popular. Rap and hip-hop and poetry slams are popular.
Personally, my mom read me AA Milne poems when I was very young and at six or so I got a children's poetry book that I loved.
But I think the move away from narrative poetry really hurt popularity. The divide between academic and popular poetry is huge.
I recommend anyone who hasn't to read Robert Service the poet of the Yukon.
That’s what I was gonna bring up as a striking point: I feel like, over time, the poetry in fashion has become far less narrative. Which is neither here nor there qualitatively, but a lot of the general populace feels like they need an order of events to follow and enjoy a piece, and as narrative became less utilized by poetry, it became more obtuse to the average reader.
I have rarely enjoyed reading poetry. Mainly because I find it difficult to sus out the intended cadence of the writer. I enjoy it so much more when someone else reads it or sings it.
This is why I don’t understand why they don’t used audiobooks more, I love Sarah Kay audiobook of her poems it’s amazing.
Traditionally, English poetry has been accentual-syllabic, which is a fancy way of saying it creates rhythm by alternating between stressed and unstressed syllables. The downbeat falls on the stressed syllables. If you speak the verse with native speaker pronunciation, you’ll naturally hit the right stresses; from there it’s just a matter of paying attention to and beginning to feel the rhythm created by those stresses. Different poetic meters, ie rhythms, are created by the number of downbeats per line, and the predominant, or default, stress pattern per beat.
Most contemporary poetry however is written in free verse, which doesn’t necessarily observe the above. Free verse is somewhat deconstructive, and uses arbitrary line breaks and arrangement to change pronunciation and cadence, and create pauses where there would usually be continuous speech, and vice versa. The effect is to disconnect the poetry from aural rhythm and instead connect it to the experience of reading it on a printed page.
Most English poetry from WWI or earlier will be metrical; most English poetry written after WWII will be free verse.
English Prosody, the name for what I’ve been outlining here, can readily be learned (it’s not a large subject) and with only a little practice you can internalize poetic rhythm. For the most part, this sort of thing is only briefly touched on in schools anymore, which might be part of why poetry unaccompanied by music has so declined in cultural relevance.
Don’t pressure yourself or think you have to read the writer’s mind. Just read it slowly and let it sort of take shape in your mind. Take your time and go through it. And if it doesn’t come together for you, that’s ok! On to the next one. Not everything is for everybody.
What's weird is there are so many genres of fiction but the vast majority of poetry is literary. There are small pockets of fantasy and scifi poets, etc., but not a lot of popular collections out there.
I think that's a holdover from the (untrue, imo) idea that those genres of prose aren't "academic" in nature, and poetry is a very academic discipline. On top of that, poetry is very personal, and poets don't live on spaceships fighting the Zorgblars. Not to say that poetry can't be done well in any genre, because it certainly can, but as an art form, I don't think the current culture of poetry is really concerned with sci-fi or fantasy because it's predominantly concerned with personal experience.
A lot of literary poets hate reading their material aloud and make a complete mess of it. It’s a different skill.
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but I genuinely think it's because a lot of modern poetry is pretty bad. I've read a lot of poetry (modern stuff, post 2000s) and I can't remember a single one that I'd rate over a 5/10. The good ones are bland and the bad ones are aggressively bad, either completely inflating benign concepts for some perceived emotional reaction or just prose written without punctuation while hitting the enter key every five or six words. A lot of it also seems to be written as some intellectual circle jerk, as though if you don't 'get it' that's because of your own subpar intelligence and not because the poet is allergic to describing things without euphemism or nonsensical metaphors.
It’s like everything else, with one crucial difference: it’s easier for bad artists to get exposure in this field than most any other.
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce is a very good book of modern american poetry imo. But then again, poetry is very subjective. There are some other ones that are really good on my book shelf, I just can’t remembering the titles rn.
It’s a negative feedback loop. Less interest in poetry because of cultural trends in entertainment leads to a drop in quality which leads to less interest in poetry
I think the professionalization of poetry has something to do with it. Other than the Insta poetry stuff, all the "serious" poetry that gets published are by academics - creative writing students or instructors. It is no longer about the poetry per se, but rather a set of academic concerns and competition among academics for academic positions. The leveling of contemporary American poetry is best understood as an effect of this. Great poems (that's great with a lowercase g!) continue to be written, but probably not in academia, and impossible to find among the mountain of dreck that the publish-or-perish crowd pushes out. Classic poetry is still a refuge for those to enjoy the art of poetry.
Hot take, we had a period where the poets didn't know how to market themselves. Right now, on tiktok, you'll find tons of people selling their poetry and reading it. They are doing their own marketing. In Indianapolis, we have an art shop hosting poetry night, shout out to Chromatic Collective. I don't think it died, I think you just need to find the places in your town, or go searching for it.
Art forms don't "die". They increase and decrease in popularity in different forms. As long as people know that poetry exists, it can't die. Anyone can read old poetry or make new poetry at any time.
At the moment, it's hard to sell a large quantity of books of poetry. That's all that this article is really saying.
It is THRIVING imho!
I think the publication medium has entirely changed. I see so much poetry (of varying qualities of course) published on TikTok for example. Continuing the last century's trend, poetry and art are becoming democratized - it is very easy to self-publish poetry to YOUR perfect audience, who has it very accessible at their fingertips. The algorithm favours this short-form content - and the intermediality only adds to it. Add music, add video, and WHOSH, you have artwork that is directly linked to some specific aesthetic discourse or topic.
I work at a used bookstore and poetry definitely sells! Amanda Lovelace (The Princess Saves Herself in this One, etc) consistently sells in a day or two when we get it in. Maya Angelou is still sought after. Homer, Dante, and others are still read and discussed in classrooms.
Poetry takes practice to read and appreciate. Everything we do and make is aimed at faster and faster consumption. Things need to be immediate. Immediately obvious, immediately attention grabbing, immediately emotional and so on.
Haikus and Limericks exist for the short-attention span crowd.
Good Haikus are typically pretty deep.
And have more rules and structure than 5-7-5
The length of the poem isn't what requires intense attention and practice.
It's that damned rap music. Some of the best poets to ever live are alive today as rappers. Go really listen, there is absolute gold there. Em, Logic, Hopsin, and so many more are out there. Sure they changed the nomenclature a bit, but its not that hard to understand meter = flow, stanza = bars and so on. Go listen, you'll find poetry alive and well.
/s for the "damned rap music" in case anybody didnt get that.
Logic and Hopsin though...
Kendrick Lamar, JID, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Black Thought, Earl Sweatshirt, Lupe Fiasco, Big Pun are less corny examples.
Was gonna say lol. The rappers you list below are really good and more importantly I find that they can deliver nuance of mixing context and references a lot better. People like Eminem and Hopsin (add Joyner Lucas to this list as well) and these lyrical rappers cause they’re so technical when tbh I see that focusing too much of these technicalities can dampen the impact of what you’re trying to present. SometimesI feel like Earl Sweatshirt does that with some songs cause he dives to much into the abstract which makes his Raps great for people who want a deep dive but terrible for casual listeners.
Yeah Earls Dad (pretty sure) was a poet and his Mom is a professor. He is definitely less accessible most of the time but lyrically he's been writing deep shit since he was like 14.
Lmfao dude didn't name Kendrick and is the only rapper to have won a Pulitzer. 🤣🤣
"I don't listen to rap but I do like Hopsin for his lyrics" reddit mfers
I died lmfao
lmfao
Yeah, I came here to say something similar. It's a funny observation to have, that poetry is dying, while it's absolute dominated pop culture in the last decade.
The problem I suspect is that the voices speaking the poetry to large audiences don't come from prominent or wealthy families but have mostly working-class origins. Poetry didn't die, poor people just took it over.
Definitely. Despite being absolutely ubiquitous in pop culture, rap has never been able to shed its rougher low-brow image. Which means talented rappers often don’t get the intellectual respect they deserve, and also that the rap community precludes people who are perceived to lack a certain ‘street creed’. You will get absolutely shit on if you try seriously to rap and are not black and/or from a rougher background, so it doesn’t quite feel like a universal art form.
see y’all over there
This world is truly dystopian
Agree. Some of the stuff spit out by the likes of MF Doom, Logic etc feels pretty earth shaking. As someone who feels like they are never getting the flavour of a poem by reading it in my head, I can definitely appreciate how a good rapper can bring the words alive in the here and now.
You didn't name Kendrick Lamar? The only rapper to have won a Pulitzer? L 😂😂
Poetry is alive and well.
Hiphop and R&B is poetry. Poetry hasn't disappeared and is probably more popular now than it ever was.
Poetry is art. Art doesn’t need commerce.
I think artists would disagree, having financial support is great
Most musicians and song writers are poet's.
Idk, most successful songs stripped of melody would make terrible poems
There's a very huge range between "successful" and top 40. There are a while lot of moderately successful musicians who write great poetry, even if they aren't necessarily what your hear on the radio.
A lot of poems are terrible poems
That's like saying if you strip the visual component out, most TV shows make terrible audiobooks.
The melody is part of the medium and is inseparable. And thus, the lyrics are written with the melody in mind. Its almost like saying, if you strip the bun off a hamburger, it makes a terrible steak. Well yes, but that's not the point. The patty is designed to be served with the bun and toppings.
Yes, that is my point. Song is mostly meaningless without the musical components. Therefore it is altogether different from poetry.
Kind of on the flipside of that, lots of really great poetry gets lost in the din of the music, beat, lil jon going YEAH etc. If you actually sit down and read the lyrics to a lot of rap songs you might have glossed over when hearing on the radio, you might be surprised at how clever it is.
They aren’t though. Poetry and song lyrics share some techniques but the language serves different purposes. Song lyrics rarely read well as poems and poetry doesn’t always lend itself to music.
They use language in very different ways
Lyric poetry, Haiku, Sonnet, Limerick, Free verse, Epic, Villanelle, Elegy, Ode, Narrative poetry, Prose poem, Sestina Poem, Blank verse, Acrostic, Tanka, Epigram, Couplet, Cinquain, Epitaph, Shakespearean Sonnets, Petrarchan sonnet, Ballad, Ghazal....
All of these different kind of poems use language in very different ways.
Can you elaborate in what ways you think language is used in different ways to serve different purposes? Maybe with an example, song lyrics and a poem in comparison?
Worked for mfa programs for a long time. Not a poet. Prose. But I know many, many poets.
I’m not sure you should go to grad school if you want to be a writer. I really don’t. I had a great experience, but I viewed it as a time to just write and write and write. Worked out, but not because of grad school. Because of the time. Nobody in grad school helped me publish. Half of the professors barely showed up. Had a couple good profs, but they all told me the same thing, “go outside this system. Don’t publish in the meaningless slew of lit mags and websites. Go out into the world.”
It would’ve been better for me, in retrospect, to go have an experience. Get a job someplace interesting and write about it.
Grad schools are churning out uninteresting writers doing uninteresting things. I know there are a few exceptions. I don’t think I’m an exception, either. I just think it’s not the kind of thing you can run through the academic enterprise.
Even studying literature is just a bunch of silly theory now. The humanities are lifeless. Strangely inhuman. Academics in these programs come out and try to turn right back around to teach in them. It’s weird.
For me poetry that doesn’t have a rhythm or interesting rhyming scheme will never be worth the time to read. The poems I do enjoy all have this, and it seems like modern poems don’t care to rhyme anymore (from my few moments of grazing)
Hi! I'm a professional poet and I would absolutely love to engage with this question. I get asked this a lot, actually. Feel free to AMA
I'm about to give a long history about the current state of contemporary poetry, but if you want the TL;DR, Tumblr, Youtube, TikTok, and Instagram have thriving poetry audiences with poets receiving millions of views and even book deals. Slams and open mics still pepper the country and attract hundreds of people. More people than ever are writing and sharing poetry, it's just less profitable than genre fiction or marketing. If you diversify your idea of what poetry is and where to find it, you'll see it all around you. Anyway, here's the whole deal:
-----------------------------
A lot of people think Poetry is a dead artform, but the truth is that it's more popular than ever. Poetry feels like a dead artform because it is not a profitable artform. The profitable version of poetry would by copywriting. It takes a very successful wordsmith to truly nail a marketing campaign. Of course, we wouldn't call that art because it feels like selling out. So there's this divide in people's minds. Poetry is a BIG TENT and when I say Big Tent, I mean almost all literary art can be considered poetry. There isn't really a specific definition of poetry. I like Jack McCarthy's definition. If at least one person (you included) thinks it's poetry, then it's probably poetry.
I digress, I'm getting off topic. Giving poetry a big tent definition probably isn't a fair way to answer this question. What I'm getting at is that lots of people are writing poetry, but not a lot of people are buying it. Just because something doesn't sell well, doesn't mean it's dying. Some would even argue that it keeps the artform more pure, as it exists only as a medium of expression, rather than a commodity. If that's the case, though, then how do I manage to make a living with poetry?
When you think of poetry, you might imagine some Victorian with a quill penning a sonnet. Or perhaps you imagine a beatnik in a smoky jazz bar wearing a turtle neck. Poetry's historical journey is very similar to that of visual art. It comes and goes in movements and those movements have radically different ideas about what poetry should look like or how it should work. These movements sometimes even occur simultaneously. The Beat Poetry movement start a long-long time ago, yet the iconic images and poets that came from it stick with us culturally. Growing out of the beat movement and the battle rap movement came the Slam movement. Have you ever been to a poetry slam? They've been going on since the 1980's and they were started in the spirit of resistance to the gatekeeping of the artform by academics and publishers. (lots of these movements tend to be resistances to that, actually)
Poetry Slams are competitions where poets have 3 minutes to share their own original work with no props, costumes, or nudity. The winner sometimes even gets prize money. Usually it's a portion of the cover charge, or a portion of the bar sales. Over time, the slam movement became more legitimized and mini-celebs we created in these poetry communities. It really took the country (and world) by storm. Giant tournaments popped up and the biggest ones were run by an org called PSI (Poetry Slam Inc) which would later go bankrupt in 2018. The Slam Movement hasn't quite recovered from that. Still, Slam created a national community and network of venues and performance poets that allowed poets to tour to various cities doing bar shows and selling homemade chapbooks. Some poets would live for years on the road, couch surfing and car living. They would make money featuring at open mics, slams, or even winning prize money at larger tournaments. Venues like The Mercury Cafe in Denver would pass a jar for the featured poet that would contain hundreds of dollars by the time it made the rounds.
From the Slam Movement, came the YouTube movement (Button Movement to some). A content creation company made up of various slam poets from the Twin Cities called Button Poetry began filming the poems at slam tournaments and releasing them on YouTube. Many of these poems would go viral and poets would be quickly become internet famous. Many of them, myself included, would get booked as performance artists and tour the country. They were doing this before as part of the Slam Movement, but with Button giving them viral videos, they were packing out massive concert venues. They would get invited to conferences, get offered book deals, or even record deals. While Button Poetry has declined in popularity recently, they still have millions of subscribers and poetry videos still make the rounds. Poets would end up getting talent representation, especially because the real money was in college gigs. Universities would pay thousands to get a YouTube famous poet on campus to do a workshop and a performance. Other notable channels adopted Button Poetry's model, including SlamFind, All Def Digital, and Write About Now.
With the collapse of PSI and the Pandemic, many poets retreated to online spaces and some of the organizers of the small slams and open mics threw in the towel. At the same time as all this slam and YouTube stuff, poets like Tyler Knott Gregson and Rupi Kaur were finding similar viral internet success on Instagram and Tumblr. Poets from the Slam movement, like Clementine von Radics, would exist on both platforms. Smart poets diversified in this way so that their work had multiple points of engagement. It became much more profitable to funnel people directly to your self published work than relying on a literary agent and publisher who were going to take a fee. Who needs them when you're already a viral sensation? So many poetry books from these artists are either small press, or self published. Button Poetry would end up starting it's own publishing house as well to funnel people from youtube to their online bookstore. Many poets took these "internet platformer book deals" and they ended up making a comfortable, lower class living. Don't be mistaken, these internet poets aren't rolling in cash by any means. Shane Koyczan became the Poet Laureate of Canada and he's just making a middle class living off of books and performance gigs as one of the most famous poets alive.
As of now, we're seeing a growing contingent of poets on TikTok. Slam artists that lost their venues and tournaments aren't chasing that Button Poetry video anymore. Instead, they're making their own videos on their TikTok channel. The nature of TikTok drives engagement in a similar way as instagram, so the super sappy love poems that dominated on Instagram, now dominate TikTok as spoken word poems. These poems are quieter, and less dynamic in their performance than Slam and Button work was. There isn't a need to capture the attention of a room of half-drunk bar patrons. Instead, they rely on asthetic to capture the attention of TikTok scrollers. Ringlights, filters, dynamic captions, etc. We're even seeing it blend with the CoreCore video editing movement. For every million views on a video, though, there's ten thousand people calling it "cringe" in the comments. Hell, Charlie Kirk loves taking poetry videos so he can hate-farm the clicks from his psychotic mob of internet fascists. Sharing Poetry is for the brave, as it has always been.
Poetry isn't going to die because it is simply a consequence of humanity. It's like dancing, or singing, or storytelling, or drawing dicks in a bathroom stall. People are going to do it because it is part of being human. Even if it doesn't make money. People do it because they have a desire to express themselves. I would encourage you to find your local open mic or slam and see if they're still around. There are whole communities of poets out there, and they have some great shit to share.
“I can’t take it y’all. I can feel the city breathing. Chest heaving. Against the flesh of the evening.”
Anyone saying poetry is dead doesn’t listen to hip hop
I am mostly only interested in poetry that rhymes and/or has some element of interesting or complex storytelling. So I usually end up reading older poetry or folk song lyrics. Also, I really like some rap lyrics but sometimes I don't enjoy the production of a song (or a particular artist's voice) as much as the words.
Lyrically, I think WAP has more interesting metaphors, lyricism and turns of phrase than most poetry books I've been recommended lately. I just can't get into it. I like story and urgency and sensuality in the context of clever rhymes and rhythm.
When the words
are gathered
onto different lines but they
speak . whisper. tell.
absolutely nothing
and
do
not
rhyme
I get bored.
When T.S. said "at the hour when we are trembling with tenderness lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone." I find it moving and passionate.
When Cardi B. said "Swipe your nose like a credit card" it was, to me, more clever and interesting than someone saying some vague things with an unclear meter that don't even rhyme. There is passion and clear metaphor and an actual rhyme scheme.
The problem with rap is that I might like someone's writing but their voice isn't always my cup of tea so it's harder to appreciate the words. Like, Kendrick Lamar is an amazing writer, but I prefer Cardi B's actual voice, so I sometimes appreciate her writing more as a finished product.
As long as I’m alive to write it, it will never die.
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Poetry once flourished like a blooming flower,
Its words like petals, soft and full of power.
A language of the soul, a symphony of thought,
With every line, emotions that it brought.
But now it seems its beauty fades away,
As if the magic of its words decays.
The once mighty pen now barely writes a line,
And poetry's death seems only a matter of time.
We've lost the art of the written word,
The rhythm, the rhyme, the message that's heard.
In a world of tweets and quick, digital sound,
Poetry's magic has been lost and not found.
But still, there are those who keep its flame,
Who keep its spirit alive, despite the shame.
For they know that poetry will always live,
As long as there are hearts that it can give.
So let us hold on to its beauty and grace,
And keep its magic alive in this fast-paced race.
For poetry's death, though it may come one day,
Is not the end, but merely a delay.
Oy. With respect, thank you for proving that rhyming is not poetry!
I don't have any meaningful knowledge of poetry, so take my opinion with a few grains of salt.
But as a person who is not a fan. I'd rather listen to it in the form of a song. It always ends too quickly. Its saturated with a lot of people who think their common sense is ground-breaking philosophy. It often does a disservice to the topics being presented by being melodramatic. And really the only good use it has (imo) is telling unique stories in spite of an oppressive format.
These are just my opinions as someone who is not super keen on it. And its kind of a rushed explanation.
My best friend during childhood says his main occupation is “Poet”. I haven’t spoken to him in decades but I’ve seen him on FB. I know we’ve take wildly different paths in our lives and wouldn’t even know each other anymore so I’ve never really reached out. I can’t help but be curious about what kind of lifestyle and income a poet has in this day. I mean, his grandparents were very wealthy but if they’re not floating him then what gives? Are people paying good money for poetry? I can’t remember the last time I heard of someone being a poet beyond the woman than read hers at Bidens inauguration.
I mean we have the entire genre of rap...
In the same way that Dinosaurs never left us they just became Birds, Poetry has also never left us, it just became music.
I feel like TS Eliot already covered this topic in The Wasteland.
I feel like a poet needs to live an interesting life. I’m all for using poetry as a cathartic experience, but the contemporary “poetry” I read today is much less…big picture, then I need good poetry to be.
If you consider rap poetry it’s very popular
There are lots of great points in here about spoken word poetry rising in popularity and poetry in music. I want to point out that in any small city there is almost certainly also a hidden poetry scene that aligns more with the old cliches most of us have about poetry.
I've been to plenty of little cafes where people were getting up and sharing original poems with an intimate, beatnik-esque crowd on a Thursday night. If that's your thing (it's totally mine) you can find it; it just takes some detective work to track down.
Other forms of art emerged, and its popularity was diluted. Video killed the radio star. So to speak. People will continue to write poetry so it will never be dead
I’m seeing a lot of comments about poetry evolving into rap, but I think a lot of people just don’t seek it out. Either that, or they encounter something from Rupi Kaur and dismiss all poetry as drivel.
Ocean Vuong and Traci Brimhall are two of my favorite contemporary poets, and they’re no slouches.
I work in publishing. Poetry is more popular now than it was 20 years ago. Internet poetry / tiktok has boosted sales so much that it's actually become something companies are looking to publish again, as opposed to just being the priority of extremely small art house prints.
I have a growing stack of zines in my apartment, poetry i bought from people ive met during my life.
Poetry isnt dying, it just isnt profitable like other more pervasive media, good poetry tries to say something, which is not something you can get on tap, which means its not practical to grow an industry around it.
Poetry isnt dead, its in the exact same place it was thousands of years ago:
Being shared between nerds with too much time on their hands
I once ready rupy Kaur and swore of any of that shit
Jokes aside, kinda people just aren't into it anymore
Honestly, when it was accepted that anything was poetry.
What makes poetry beautiful and worthy of admiration are the constraints.
Sometimes. I'd argue it's more about facility with language. You don't need constraints so much as intention, and a lot of poets just write what looks like streams of consciousness with no regard for poeticism in language (repetition, assonance and consonance, rythm, etc.).
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I honestly wonder if that may be part of the problem. I remember like a decade ago when fanfiction.net opened their original writing site which included a poetry category. I uploaded some poems I wrote. No one reviewed them, no one even read them. Upon further examination, I couldn’t find a single poem with a review.
Tons and tons of people write poetry, but no one wants to read it. Plus anyone can throw 100 stream of consciousness poems on the internet in the time it takes a seasoned poet to carefully write one. And schools encourage the former form of poetry, so everyone comes away from their intro to creative writing classes thinking they are a poet. The good to crap ratio is just too low.
I simply do not get it.
I try to get it, I want to get it. But I don’t. I don’t understand verse, it seems unusually convoluted. They don’t even rhythm most the time. I must be missing something here.
Other art forms became more entertaining and widely popular
I dont think poetry books are bought as much because they are so accessible online for free.
I tried to run a poetry club in Ahmedabad, which had 20 editions but only a few contained poetry and people who love words flowing like a river in spring.
These days, meaningless rhymes, heavy words (majority Urdu words to create "impact"), and creating an open mic atmosphere with hooting, have taken the life out of those words that used to rebel, against all rights and wrongs of the land.
Most of them were men. It was very difficult to get women to come and when they did, they came for the experience but rarely came twice. I have heard 1000s of "Shayari" by "a broken heart" (fictional) to become part of the "men" who are "poets" category.
Women were the subjects of these "poems" as devoted mothers or a woman who scorned and is no longer required. Nothing more. And these were all gentlemen who "respect" women. But they never see women as a human being.
And when I went to Mahila Kavita Sammelan's headed by wives of IIM professors, they too, have been abducted by the "validation" provided by the online world of self-published work. Be it unedited or mechanical, it does not matter to these housewives. But they are doing a commendable job holding these sessions. I hope they do it for a feeling of content rather than a race.
Whatever I am saying is all personal experience. Yours may be different. But I crave to meet poets in person and hear original flawed personal poetry, English or Hindi as those are the languages I can feel in.
I hope to find people who understand the weight behind the simple word: Kavita or Poetry.
I am still trying to keep the club alive.
I think it's hard to find poetry books vs novels. For example my favorite poetry books are omeros and deaf republic, everytime I try to look up books with similar formats, I only get esoteric book descriptions or reviews which isn't very helpful.
I’m still writing it.
Not at all - its merely transformed into hip/hop and rap.
Define popular? How many people where there reading Poetry? How many with access to poetry. Today chatgpt can give you a haiku
Not enough people dropping their poetry book recommendations. I finished Ada Limon’s Bright Dead Things a few months back (she’s now the current US Poet Laureate), some bangers in there (Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds!!!). I’m working on Forrest Gander’s Be With, a Pulitzer Prize winner, some truly nuts visuals in this one. I just got notified Mothman Apologia by Robert Wood Lynn came off back order and shipped (I read About the Phones and NEEDED more). I got a fat anthology of WS Merwin on my shelf that I open to a random page and enjoy whenever the need hits. A copy from high school of You Get So Alone At Time That It Just Makes Sense by Charles Bukowski has made it thru every apartment and cross country move with me. Up next, I have some Ursula K Le Guin (Late in the Day), and a collection my high school english teacher published recently!
This post is meant for u/poem_for_your_sprog.
Poetry is more popular now than anytime in the past 50 years. What the hell you talking about OP?
No offense, but what do you think lyrics are to songs? Poetry is far from dead. It's a bullion dollar industry and live and well. You're welcome to go look up song lyrics for free if you want them in written from only, but most find it way more enticing to put those poems to use in tandem with actual artists speaking it and alongside musical cadences.
I think part of the issue with poetry is that it’s harder to sift through for most people. Music and TV has clear easily defined genres and we have well developed algorithms to recommend both to people. Netflix and Spotify make finding shows and music you like relatively easy.
Meanwhile, it’s harder to find a poem that is absolutely amazing. In part, I think this is due to poetry being more personal and specific for some people, but it’s also that it just hasn’t been really organized in an easy to parse catalogue.
adding to the discussion
The moment voice could be recorded and replayed, poetry when from being read or recited out loud, to mostly listened to, That said written-published poetry is still strong, but it's not, from a business point of view, a big player. (Edit)
Modern peotry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkNp56UZax4 Allen Ginsberg reads "Howl," (Big Table Chicago Reading, 1959)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNlS_Vbip_Q W.H. Auden reads In Memory of W.B. Yeats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv4-sgFw3Go Dylan Thomas, 1952: A Child's Christmas in Wales, A Story - Recorded at Steinway Hall, NY
Spoken word
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRvJ32J2bBI Sage Francis Crack pipes (NSFW)
They became rappers and song writers.
Poetry became ubiquitous. It isn't dying, it's just not held up on a pedestal anymore as important in and of itself.
Rap music. It’s poetry with a beat.
No. Every song written, is a poem.
This is the age of video and multimedia arts. Entertainment like poetry that requires focus and mental exertion can’t compete with passive entertainment designed for maximum stimulation and addictiveness unless there is a conscious movement on the part of parents and society to limit screen time for kids and encourage quality reading. Unfortunately parents give kids smartphones instead and schools allow them in classrooms. It’s fully possible to raise children who love reading and aren’t addicted to screens but we need to change our priorities
I don't think it's dying, but I'm sad that not so many people are interested in it.
music happened