The strange thing is that while people don't talk about it that much, most people I know either write or have written some poetry, and when I mention the subject, again a majority of people will cite a favourite poet or poem - often Tennyson, Poe, Plath, Shelly, Yeats, Benjamin Zephania, Lear, Byron, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Larkin etc etc.
I think people do have an appetite for poetry, but other media forms such as TV are more immediate and allow the viewer to be passive (as Proust suggested, the brain is a very lazy organ except in times of stress, which perhaps explains the number of confessional poems around).
But then again, I was watching the excellent Taxi Driver the other day, an extremely popular film amongst cinema literate young people, and De-Niro's monologues are pure poetry. How much more charged with meaning can you get than:
'All the animals come out at night -
whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens,
fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal.
Someday a real rain will come
and wash all this scum off the streets.'
or
'The days go on and on...
they don't end. All my life needed was a sense
of someplace to go. I don't believe
that one should devote his life
to morbid self-attention,
I believe that one should become
a person like other people. '
I have taken the liberty of applying line breaks to found text, both in the tradition of Yeats and because I'm worth it (snigger).
Cinema is an extremely assimilative artform. It often failed to hold itself in high regard during its formative years and was perhaps less ashamed to magpie from other forms. More fundamentally, its very nature enabled it to incorporate elements of all other non-interactive artforms.
So maybe people are going elsewhere for the same fix?
However, I think standalone poetry has so much potential because it offers the reader an experience that is uniquely his, precisely because he is forced to do the hard work. The poem gives you the bones, but you must put flesh on them through an exercise of the imagination; more so than with any other form, the audience is the artist.
In a culture like ours where we have had our imaginations blunted through an excess of passively received sensation I think poetry is needed more than ever - it is the difference between a roller coaster ride and flying.
Alex
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