On perspectives about poetry
I don’t know about the public perspective at large—they’re not a monolith, so in a way this is an impossible question to answer—but most of my students aren’t writing or English majors, so I can use them as a limited cross section here.
Most of my students come into my classes not having read poetry outside of a high school classroom (except perhaps as a greeting card), and most of what they read then was pretty formal and perhaps not very dense. Often they think of poems as puzzles to be unlocked wherein they will discover a Truth! that will make all the difference. And certainly some poems attempt to do that, though most don’t.
The other misconception (I’m giving you two) that many outside the literary community have about poetry is the idea that it’s not for them. And they have reason. Poetry reminds me of jazz, in a way, in that there’s great variety in styles and approaches, and yet very little of it has a massive following. Smooth jazz appeals to one kind of listener and free jazz another and swing yet another and so on. You can find poetry’s influence in all manner of writing, just as you can find jazz underneath most musical forms today, but few people spend time with the source material outside the practitioners.
I’m not suggesting this is a marketing failure, by the way—it could be that this is just the nature of the art form. But I can’t tell you the number of students I’ve had who’ve told me at the end of a semester that they’d never been interested in poetry before who’ve since bought collections, just because they’d never been exposed to a style or type of poetry that made them go “wow! Language can do that?!” the way E. E. Cummings did to me in my junior year of high school.
As for people inside the literary community, well, again, we’re not a monolith, but I think sometimes we’re a little doom and gloom. I think that when our literary grandchildren look back on this period—the early 21st century—they’ll recognize it as a moment as alive and explosive for poetry at the Modernist period a century previous. I think we’re in the middle of a fundamental shift in the way poetry is written and published and expressed and a lot of it has to do with the digital landscape we’re working in now.
