World Class Poetry Blog

Should Poets Lament The Decline Of Literature?
11 June 2008, the poet @ 8:20 pm

This has been on my mind for some time now. I think we’re hearing more and more often how people don’t read as much any more and how they read poetry even less. This is evidently something we’re supposed to be crying over. But I’m not so sure that’s the proper response.

Dana Gioia published his seminal essay “Can Poetry Matter” in 1991. Since then, it’s become a poetic tradition to pass it around and read it 15 times in the cruelest month and once or twice during the rest of the year. Yet no one ever asks, and I think we should, “Does poetry matter any more now than it did then?”

It’s The Economy, Stupid
Ron Silliman points out on his blog, on June 7, that in the 1940s the percentage of poetry books published to all titles was about 1% and that similarly last year it was the same. The actual number of poetry titles published 60 years ago, he says, was about 100 compared to 4,000 today. That doesn’t exactly look like much of a decline.

I haven’t checked Silliman’s figures and I don’t intend to. I assume that he’s done his homework and that he’s correct. I’ll also further assume that people do less reading today than they did 60 years ago, something we’re supposed to lament. What does all of this mean?

Here’s what I think it means:

People don’t read any less poetry than they did 60 years ago. There are fewer people reading poetry and more people writing it. Effectively, that means that the majority of the audience for most poets is other poets. That’s not by design; it is that way I believe because of the laws of economics.

When the Beatles made it big they were largely the phenomenon that they were because of the limitation in distribution channels and the lack of competition. No one else was doing what they were doing and there was one show on TV that simply by appearing on that show meant that they would have fans. The Beatles became an overnight sensation because of Ed Sullivan. Today, that sort of success could not be duplicated because the distribution channels are multitudinous. And everyone is now doing what the Beatles started. So it’s not really all that much of a big deal any more.

In the 1950s when Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, it was much the same way. The Beats were doing what no one else was doing. There was a culture that was growing up within the mainstream of America and it was something that no one could do anything about. But the distribution channels were much fewer and the competition was much less. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti couldn’t help but be famous. You could say it was destiny. That kind of success couldn’t be duplicated today even if someone tried.

If you take an ounce of sand and pour it into a small funnel, the sand will whirl quickly through the funnel to a container you have set beneath it. But if you pour ten pounds of sand into the largest funnel that you can find then that 10 pounds will not move through the funnel very quickly. You wouldn’t be able to find a funnel big enough. And that’s what we have today - we have a huge funnel of distribution channels and a lot of poets trying to compete to get through that funnel.

Everyone Wants To Be A Poet
I’m not sure how it happened, but suddenly everyone wanted to be a poet. Whether it was William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, or Kenneth Koch, somehow people thought it was cool enough to want to pursue poetry as a profession. But poetry stopped being a moneymaker along the way. People found new modes of entertainment, but the poets were stuck on the old media of expression.

With nothing else to do, and a dwindling audience, poets decided to try a few things to see if they could inject a sense of hope into the poetic future. They started deconstructing. Derrida became the new god and old forms were gone. If we were to ever appeal to the masses again we had to do it with something that had never been done before. Utter shit. And that’s what poet’s began to produce. Total, utter shit.

The hope was that non-poets wouldn’t notice that the poets, the elite, the few and the proud, weren’t just sitting in ivory walls composing beautiful verses. The hope was that we could build institutions to protect our right to produce shit. Since there weren’t any readers any more we might as well just take over the halls of academia, secure grants and fellowships, build up community arts organizations, and live off the public purse while we write our shit. And it worked for a while. The National Endowment for the Arts has become one of the darlings of shit. Thank Derrida!

But then came the New Formalists to save us from our shit. Among them was Dana Gioia. He was going to deliver us to the promised land of more readers. Poetry, he preached, can matter. We just have to write the right kind of poetry then the readers will come to us again. And here we are, more than 15 years later, and they haven’t. Yet poetry books are just flying off the shelves left and right.

If you have thousands of books hitting the market to survive a few hundred readers then some of those books aren’t going to be bought. It’s all in the pocketbook. Sure, you’ll have your best sellers - Billy Collins, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver - but you’ll also have your lowly non-read geniuses. Many poets without widespread readerships are actually better poets than the honored prize-winners. But they don’t have the right connections. And that’s the major difference.

Gioia’s effort to revive poetry was admirable, but was only partly on the mark. Many poets, particularly those in academia, published just so they could keep their jobs and move up the corporate chain (re: institutional ladder). But poetry has branched off into several directions, each fork veering from two main roads - the academic, institutionalize poetic culture and what you might call “street” poetry where slam poetry, Spoken Word, and other such forms fall. Quite frankly, many of the best poets today are in the latter camp and they don’t write poetry or publish it as a means to an end. For them, it is the end.

Not everyone has what it takes to be a poet. Just because you like poetry doesn’t mean you should write it. There must be an audience. Without the audience there is no performer. And poetry is as much a performance as it is anything else. But that doesn’t mean that we are competing with action/adventure films and pro football.

I recently read some of my own poems to a group of people at my church. They’re intelligent people. One is a doctor. One is a lawyer. But I’m not sure they got it. The questions they ask tell me that they largely don’t get the poetry. It’s like Greek to them. They understand Latin just fine. But they don’t get the metaphors and the plays on words that poets typically enjoy infusing into our verses, which is why I think many poems today aren’t written that way.

If you study the bulk of poetry being published today, there is an attempt to write it in a conversational style. This is done to “make it more accessible.” Yet people go on about their business and don’t notice. The readership is still in decline. Why?

It is largely, I think, because poets are trying too hard. Guys almost never go for the girl at the party who is too obviously trying to get his attention. They’d much rather go after the modest gal who is attractive and appears not interested. If poets will just focus on producing good poetry, whether it takes five minutes or 15 years, and quit trying to appeal to readers then the audiences will come. There is no need to pander or try to guess what people will like. Just write what is in your spirit. If it has value then readers will value it. If it doesn’t then you need to hone your craft.

It’s really that simple. And I don’t think we need prophets to lead us to new promised lands.

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