/lit/ - Literature

>>7006716
Obviously it's ridiculous to say something like poetry is "dead", but it's certainly not as popular as it once was. In academic circles, however, it's still thriving as much as ever.

Nah, m8. Poetry is still living and evolving. Just look at slam poetry!

>>7006716

Thins like this scare me:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/24/poetry-is-going-extinct-government-data-show/

>>7006716

This makes sense:

"Perhaps poetry worthy of the name, past and present, simply calls at some point for oral reading and sharing for full apprehension. Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad were preserved by a bard’s chant. The plays of Aristophanes, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, achieved immortality through theatrical presentations. With the exception of the sonnets and a few long poems, Shakespeare wrote his great body of poetry as dialogue to be spoken in performance. We recall the best lyrics of Porter, Berlin, Gershwin, and Sondheim through hearing them sung. Poetry, in short, needs audiences."

http://www.vqronline.org/essay/how-dead-poetry

>>7006787

And this too:

Poets today are not their own best friends or advocates. They form veritable guilds excluding the world at large. Veteran poet and critic Louis Simpson described the situation this way, in the New York Times Magazine:

Poets [in the 1940s] were isolated. There were no creative writing programs and poetry-writing workshops; they just started writing on their own. Poets today begin by enrolling in a creative-writing program in any one of a hundred universities. ... After receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree they will teach writing workshops and keep in touch with others who do the same. They will support one another and pass on news of available grants and fellowships. If one of them should be so lucky as to become a member of an Academy or Institute, he or she will do everything that he or she can do to bring in his or her friends.

The situation may be even worse than Simpson’s depiction of a noble calling fallen into the hands of self-promoting sororities and fraternities. Fans of what is essentially greeting card verse form vast organizations that hold national conventions. For many high school teachers, poetry is an excuse for assigning mechanical determinations of rhyme and meter. Inexpert college teachers urge freshmen to hunt for symbols, influences, biographical details, sociological import. Robin Williams’s supposedly heroic teacher thoughtlessly (and smugly) turned a sensitive boy’s confusions into suicide, through the power of poetry.

>>7006716

I give great part of my breath, of my blood, of my brain fluids, of my physical and mental health as food and salary to poetry and verse-drama. I have improved a lot during the course of the last 13 years (is unbelievable how much you can travel if you simply keep making step after step) and still have hundreds of plot-ideas that I would like to frame into plays.

I suffer with terrible anxiety, mostly related to my work and performance. I go to bed thinking in writing-problems and character/plot construction failures that must be corrected; I wake up thinking about the work for the day and, while I am at shower, my nerves are already starting to shake. Finally I sit at my table, drink my coffee, and force myself to work, even when I don’t want to, even when anxiety is crushing my lungs and throat and hearth (it usually goes away after a while). I need to take medication for anxiety, and sometimes, when even after good nights of sleep I am still feeling tired, I take modafinil to help me with sleepiness. After the morning-writing I need to go to work, and at work I keep ruminating some technical problems that must be solved, or some verses and prose passages that need improvement.

I eat healthy, I go to the gym, I sleep properly, but not for vanity: all I want is to live long enough to keep writing, to keep making poetry.

And all of this, I can’t help but think, is for nothing. I feel that poetry is dead, that is somehow irrelevant in today’s world, that it is not something that people desire anymore. I don’t know if it is the advent of films, TV, videogames and the internet, if it is only my deformed views of the past, or if it is the congregation of several different factors, but I simply can’t help thinking that I am laboring in an old and noble art that is not necessary anymore.

Art is not dead: there are sublime masterpieces being made in TV and in films, and yes, even in videogames. There are great graphic novels, great books of short-stories and, naturally, great novels (although the flow is not that steady): art is alive, it is still breathing all around us. And yet poetry seems to be made only by renegaded students, by strange and perturbed people, and generally what we have are amalgamations of references and obscure expressions that are only read by other students and professors: it’s as if the low-level of competition on the field attracts underachievers who will feel safe by not facing brutal competition.

>>7006818

2/2

Time and time again I have seen people call poetry boring, and an exaggeration, and not-to-the-point. Playwrights that decide to risk themselves with verse drama must be ready to face severe criticism from the part of critics and public. Any elevation of style is soon criticized as flowery and artificial (even Nabokov great works suffer some attacks like that), and there isn’t a single contemporary poet in the world whose name is known by most people.

And yet I will keep giving all my energy and effort to this noble art. I feel myself sometimes exactly like the old sword-masters and sword-fighters in Japan who, even when gunpowder and peace were starting to make their abilities irrelevant, simply refused to let their art die and keep moving forward, an extinct species, refusing to “evolve” and willing to fight until the very end.

But it is still a sad thing to see poetry be so absent from popular mind and education; it is sad not to see people in general derive so much pleasure from poetry as they get from TV and movies. The solution is to forget glory, to forget recognition, to forget acceptance and simply keep practicing your art, keep refining your art, creating it as a tribute to yourself and to the great masters of the past.

I really hope I can start to gain some audience on the theater. My first comedy is un-playable, but the tragedy I’m writing right now might eventually find a director, and so the two other comedies I am planning and sketching. But I am not going to take this as a certain fact; I am already well prepared to face failure and keep working for the sake of the craft alone.

>>7006818
>>7006828
I'll read/watch your work, anon. I admire your dedication - I want to write poetry too, but I could never spend all my time on it, I'd go insane from always worrying whether it was good enough or not.

>>7006716
Short answer? Probably sorta but no

Long answer? Ehhh maybe not really kinda, depends.

Really, obviously there are people out there that read canonical poetry, starting with Homer and reading all the way through to Ashbery and trying to keep some semblance of a tradition alive. Are these people fewer in number than previous eras? Perhaps, but there's no way to quantify this. All we remember are the people that made a difference or did something notable, so who's to say we don't have people doing notable things today? We'll have to wait and find out.

Poetry isn't as appealing as it once was. Today there are a dozen more options when it comes to hobbies, passing time, and entertainment than there used to be. It just means that the few who do still choose to pursue verse as a serious endeavor are just as if not more sincere about it than ever.

>>7006859
Actually, >>7006759 pretty much quantifies it (at least for America), but I agree with your last point. Nothing wrong with culling out people who aren't truly interested, there are still plenty out there for whom poetry is irreplaceable.

>>7006851
>I admire your dedication - I want to write poetry too, but I could never spend all my time on it, I'd go insane from always worrying whether it was good enough or not.

It’s something you build up with time. The more you work on it the more ambitious you become, and as you see your capacities growing you start to feel more and more attracted to the thing. But the great mark on my development came when I abandoned for the most part the lyrical poetry (the small pieces, the sonnets, the individual minor works) for the dramatic one. When you have stories to tell and characters to develop things get considerably more difficult (for example, you can’t use poetry for expose metaphors and similes and verbal mastery alone, but a lot of times your verses need to simply move the action forward: you have the weight of the tale that need to be told constantly upon your shoulders), but at the same time much more interesting.

You suddenly find yourself speaking as people you never dreamed to be and about subjects that are not particularly interesting to you, and you are able to make great discussions that are, if you really think about it, a sort of chess-game played by you against yourself. You use your empathy (one of the greatest tools for a writer) to imagine how total strangers would feel and act in given situations. It’s quite interesting.

Of course, there’s always the self-doubt and the pressure that are road-fellows to artistic ambition; but to be honest my nerves are weak: I think you would probably handle the work and the pressure much better than me.

>>7006881
By "these people" I was referring to those who study and attempt to contribute to the tradition, not the average American, because I think it's the ones actively participating and putting the work in the medium that determine whether an art is dead or not.

>>7006893
I mean, if we determine whether a medium is still alive or not based in how many average Americans look at it, I don't have too many hopes for anything humanities related.

>>7006893
Yes, this is the best way to look at it, but I believe what the OP meant was that poetry's overall cultural influence is diminishing, which is certainly true.

>>7006792
ever heard of a poetry society, friend?

I heard something regarding the growing number of published poetry on the radio a few days ago.
It was argued that the number of actual readers of per publication always remains at a steady low

I think this is one of the main problems: not telling stories; put the lyric as the main form.

“Poets have not altogether given up on telling stories. Some of Robert Frost's best poems are narratives. Although fragmented and disjunctive, even "The Waste Land" tells a story; so, too, in a very different way, does Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning." In Life Studies (1957), Robert Lowell conveyed portions of his autobiography in verse. Among contemporary poets, Herbert Morris, in finely controlled blank verse, has written dramatic monologues and accounts of his childhood that are essentially narrative in character and quite successfully so. But for the vast most part contemporary poetry has gone off in the direction of the lyric. In practice, this means a shortish poem, usually fewer than forty lines, generally describing an incident or event or phenomenon of nature or work of art or relationship or emotion, in more or less distinguished language, the description often, though not always, yielding a slightly oblique insight.”

“ SAMUEL JOHNSON, who said of Paradise Lost that "None ever wished it longer than it is," said in the same essay on Milton that "All that short compositions can commonly attain is neatness and elegance." There are various reasons why so many contemporary poems are, in Johnson's phrase, "short compositions," and not the least among them is that most magazines do not provide space for long poems. They choose not to do so on the assumption, probably correct, that few even quite serious readers wish to read a poem that runs ten or more pages. (Let us not speak of the talent that it takes to sustain an extended poetic performance.) But in taking up the lyric as its chief form, contemporary poetry has seriously delimited itself. It thereby gives away much that has always made literature an activity of primary significance; it gives away the power to tell stories, to report on how people live and have lived, to struggle for those larger truths about life the discovery of which is the final justification for reading. Thus has poetry in our day become, in the words of the intelligent young poet and critic Brad Leithauser, "a sadly peripheral art form."

https://antville.org/static/sites/buoy/files/epstien.pdf

>>7006716
It's evolved into...rap.

>>7007106
i'm so tired of having this conversation
just fuck off

>>7006818
>>7006828

That's a great manga