(Is it shallow of me that I'm so distracted by the repeated misuse of the hyphen in "dead-end"? I suspect it is. So be it.)
I was pleased to see that, like me, most of the essayists just couldn't seem to summon the proper alarm over the demise of the old, monolithic conception of poetry in the broader culture.
For example, I'm not particularly alarmed by the fact that I've never heard of any of these "acclaimed" poets before...nor by the fact that I don't particularly care for the poems linked to their articles. Ironically, this is the very phenomenon to which alarmists point when they say "Poetry is at a dead-end [sic]."
Where is the modern poet whom the entire culture--or even the entire poetry world--worships and adores? Alas, alack, that pedestal no longer exists, and I, as a modern poet myself, can no longer climb atop it.
True, modern poets just don't become cultural icons in the way, say, Carl Sandburg or Robert Frost once did. Or, if you're not a fan of Maya Angelou, perhaps the complaint is that the "wrong" poets are becoming cultural icons. Either way, it boils down to disgruntlement over poetry's tent becoming too large for everyone to hear the same poetic voices at the same time. Instead, the tent houses tens of thousands of smaller poetry circles, most aware only of themselves and of the circles immediately adjacent to them.
Part of the nature of big tents is that they're a bit drafty in some places and a bit stuffy in others. You have three options for dealing with that.
The option that most of the culture takes is to abandon the tent entirely, after failing to find value in what is produced here. This is a perfectly legitimate choice, just like the choice not to tip for lousy service. Poets really need to stop whining when people exercise their right to seek entertainment and enlightenment outside the poetry tent...especially if poets have no intention of making their own work more entertaining or enlightening.
Another option--the one most poets take--is to move around and find a niche within that big tent that is more comfortable, often with the help of journals whose editors have similar tastes, or forums like Eratosphere.
A third option, and a very popular one, is to continue to sit on the decrepit old "main stage" area and loudly decry the fact that the tent is not as small and cozy as it used to be. These are the folks who mourn the fact that the traditional taste-making institutions no longer control access to audiences, and who write innumerable articles that ask Is Poetry Still Relevant, because the culture no longer worships the same small handful of poets.
I don't really understand their thinking. Aren't we all accustomed to only finding four or five poems in any issue of any poetry magazine that really float our personal boats? It didn't take me long to accept the fact that I'm not going to like the vast majority of what is published, and that the most acclaimed poets tend to be acclaimed for things that don't appeal to me personally. (That much-ballyhooed quality, "edginess," often strikes me as simple, blunt pessimism. I personally think of sex as something fun and joyful and fulfilling, so I can only read so many "edgy" poems and stories about desperately unhappy, depressing sex before I've had enough. But lots of other people seem to love that type of poetry. There's room for all of us under the tent.)
Likewise, don't we all accept the fact that not every reader is going to praise and adore what we produce, either?
I guess I see poetry as something analogous to television. Do I wail and moan and wring my hands about the state of television, because there are only two or three shows that appeal to me personally? No. I just enjoy those two or three shows, and find other things to do with the rest of my time.
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