The Death of the Death of Poetry

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Two things spurred me to start this blog: my two Kindles, where I’ve been rereading Homer, Sappho, Whitman and Shakespeare and The End of Verse?, Mark Bain, Newsweek, 03/25/2009

Comments from readers of this article, all three, revolve around the main theme around this debate, not poetry’s death or how it came to be, but what poetry is. Is it a rhyme scheme or a set of themes?  Is it relevant, rap, or the art of metaphor?  One of the commentators “function” alludes to a more common description in modern fiction or science fiction – language as symbols.  Language is a set of symbols, but literally (which turns out to be an unintended ironic pun), the symbols that represent language in futurists thoughts (Stephenson’s Anathem, for example), are actual moving (visual) glyphs that convey information.  Hieroglyphics still live today in Asian languages like Chinese – yet, there’s poetry there, too.  

Being that April is National Poetry Month, I think it’s very fitting to start writing about how verse isn’t dying and that curmudgeonly poets like Charles Bernstein who think “accessibility” and popularity means that verse has been watered down to be understood by the masses who couldn’t discern meter from trope, however warm being an elitist makes one feel, isn’t correct.  (Although it is probably true that even the language of poetry is fading.)

So this blog will have a few purposes:

  • Point to the vast array of poetry resources out there
  • Highlight some great poets (without using the adjective “accessible”)
  • Refer to any Kindle-ready poetry for download.

In the spirit of the last point, here’re two links Amazon Poetry for the Kindle and Amazon US Poetry, Kindle and a few links regarding the Kindle and poetry:

From Edmumd Wilson’s 1934 essay “Is Verse a Dying Technique?”

The more one reads the current criticism of poetry by poets and their reviewers, the more one becomes convinced that the discussion is proceeding on false assumptions. The writers may belong to different schools, but they all seem to share a basic confusion.
This confusion is the result of a failure to think clearly about what is meant by the words ‘prose,’ ‘verse,’ and poetry’—a question which is sometimes debated but which never gets straightened out. Yet are not the obvious facts as follows?
What we mean by the words ‘prose’ and ‘verse’ are simply two different techniques of literary expression. Verse is written in lines with a certain number of metrical feet each; prose is written in paragraphs and has what we call rhythm. But what is ‘poetry,’ then? What I want to suggest is that ‘poetry’ formerly meant one kind of thing but that it now means something different, and that one ought not to generalize about ‘poetry’ by taking all the writers of verse, ancient, medieval and modern, away from their various periods and throwing them together in one’s mind, but to consider both verse and prose in relation to their functions at different times.
The important thing to recognize, it seems to me, is that the literary technique of verse was once made to serve many purposes for which we now, as a rule, use prose.

Some food for thought: