The end of verse. Again?

The end of verse.Again?
by Ted Burke
07/19/2009, 10:06 PM #

Newsweek ran a piece not long ago about a the results of a report from The National Endowment for the Arts that was a mix of good news and bad news about American reading habits; people were reading more , with increases in fiction and non fiction alike, but we were, collectively , reading less poetry. The article takes the usual dooming sensationalist slant with the article's title, The End of Verse?People love to read about funerals, I guess, or the cultural echo of re-runs have truly colonized our attention spans. This is the same used car with a new coat of paint.

There is a long history of poets and critics declaring poetry is something completely other than prose, a separate art approximating a form of meta-writing that penetrates the circumscribed certainties of words and makes them work harder, in service to imagination, to reveal the ambiguity that is at the center of a literate population's perception. An elitist art, in other words, that by the sort of linguistic magic the poet generates sharpens the reader's wits; it would be interesting if someone conducted a study of the spread of manifestos , from competing schools of writing, left and right, over the last couple hundred of years and see if there is connecting insistence at the heart of the respective arguments .

What they'd find among other things, I think, is a general wish to liberate the slumbering population from the doldrums of generic narrative formulation and bring them to a higher, sharper, more crystalline understanding of the elusive quality of Truth; part of what makes poetry interesting is not just the actual verse interesting (and less interesting ) poets produce, but also their rationale as to why they concern themselves with making words do oddly rhythmic things. Each poet who is any good and each poet who is miserable as an artists remains, by nature, didactic ,chatty, and narcissistic to the degree that , as a species , they are convinced that their ability to turn a memorable ( or at least striking phrase) is a key with which others may unlock Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The lecturing component is only as interesting as good as the individual writer can be--not all word slingers have equal access to solid ideas or an intriguing grasp on innovative language--but the majority of readers don't want to be edified. They prefer entertainment to enlightenment six and half days out of the week, devouring Oprah book club recommendations at an even clip; the impulse with book buyers is distraction, a diversion from the noise of he world. Poetry, even the clearest and most conventional of verse , is seen as only putting one deeper into the insoluble tangle of experience. Not that it's a bad thing, by default, to be distracted, as I love my super hero movies and shoot 'em ups rather than movies with subtitles, and I don't think it's an awful thing for poetry to have a small audience. In fact, I wouldn't mind at all if all the money spent on trying to expand the audience were spent on more modest presentations. The audience is small, so what has changed?
ted burke
http://ted-burke.blogspot.com/

Bad Poetry Contest 2007

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On the Renovation of Point State Park
by RonB52
08/14/2007, 9:35 PM #

-Pittsburgh, PA

O plump peak'ed Bridges, twins nearly
But that one lies a bit lower,
How supple and splendid you look, uplifted by your new paint job.
Uplifted by your fancy new paint job.
Paint job.

O fair triangular park, whose infield grass
Once grew free, to signal the passing of Spring's innocence,
And Summer's time to play
Denuded now, bare mound,
Scraped clean for your remodeling.
Scraped smooth and clean for your remodeling.

Modeling

O twin tunnels, ever clotted with traffic
In and out, in and out, all day long.
How constantly you spew us out and sometimes
We trail behind us, down your long lanes that spread beneath you this way, and that,
Traces of that moist deliquescence that ever seeps down your slimy walls.
May those lanes ever straddle this majestic Point
Whose fountain even now e'er spews.

Whose fountain even during the renovation e'er spews.

E'er spews.

Crazy Shapes and Impossible Colors

Subject: cat
From: Ted_Burke
Date: Sep 11 2006 2:54AM

Crazy Shapes and Impossible Colors

We take a hard look as
each comes into the house

still breathing, no bullet holes,
no signs of rigor, the skin a hail pink,

and everyone gets a hug, a handshake,
are told to make themselves a drink while
the turkey finishes cooking in its own juices,

somehow the year feels
lighter than it seemed,
less like overcoat pockets lined
with lead weights and rocks

and more a windbreaker that lets the
latest wind from up the canyon
a bone chill with
each fingering gust,

most of us are still here,
our tales have been

added too, our families
have gained more
than we've lost,

small kids jump
on the beds

where the coats are laid,
investigate alien closets and

their landscape of dress shoes in
crazy shapes and impossible colors,

someone is already impossibly loaded,
stewed in his juices,

baked with his smoke,
hand gestures that speak

too loud of love
that never dies when

it's a good man
with a woman at his side,

dinner comes ten minutes late
and just in the nick of time,
the world has seldom been this delicious,

Sarah Vaughn sings a blues
that is the color of every night sky.

http://fray.slate.com/?id=3936&m=18152234