Will somebody please disrupt Poetry already(ixjy.com)
ixjy.com
Will somebody please disrupt Poetry already
http://ixjy.com/post/22704727159/will-somebody-please-disrupt-poetry-already
6 comments
OP appears to be under the illusion that the only living poet that anyone has heard of is "Maya" (whoever that may be)
I'm not particularly interested in poetry, but even I could name three living poets immediately without thinking, and a few more with a bit of thought.
I'm not particularly interested in poetry, but even I could name three living poets immediately without thinking, and a few more with a bit of thought.
Bad prose is not the way to make me trust your judgment in poetry.
'Why don’t most poems make sense?
Poems don’t make sense because poets have no incentive to make them make sense in order to get them read. Does that make sense? The fault lies not only with the poets, but also with the system through which supposedly “good” new poems and poets are identified and published.'
For what value of "most"? My reading time is finite, and there is only so much poetry that I read, but there are poets actively writing whose poetry is quite as clear as prose.
'Why don’t most poems make sense?
Poems don’t make sense because poets have no incentive to make them make sense in order to get them read. Does that make sense? The fault lies not only with the poets, but also with the system through which supposedly “good” new poems and poets are identified and published.'
For what value of "most"? My reading time is finite, and there is only so much poetry that I read, but there are poets actively writing whose poetry is quite as clear as prose.
I'd suggest that the problem with poetry is much more complex than this essay recognizes. I'd also note that there is no scope for monetizing it any more because the commercial poetry market imploded between 1918 and 1940; these days it's virtually impossible to sell poems, and about the only people making money from the field are doing so indirectly, via academic research/teaching posts. It should be possible for poets to use the same self-publishing channels as everyone else who's banging on about the "ebook revolution" ... so why aren't they?
You can disrupt a living, breathing field. It is somewhat harder to disrupt a body that's been dead for so long that the corpse is fully skeletonized.