I live in an environment where poetry does not exist.
Not one person of my acquaintance in this district has even the most passing interest in poetry.
The main commercial bookstore in the nearest main town has no poetry section.
When I took a few of my chapbooks up to the local tourist shops to see if they would carry them, I could not find one shop-owner prepared to find space for them.
Not one.
They need all the room they have for things which have a chance of being sold.
And a few of them even glared at me, as if I had asked if I could leave a heap of dead rats in their shop.
I loaned two shopkeepers copies so they could see what it was all about. Both said no, and returned their copies without comment.
I realize that it is not as bad as this elsewhere, but it is still a fact that MOST poetry today is read and bought by other poets, and not by general readers.
Partly this is the fallout (as the essay argues) from the high modernist desire to remove serious poetry from mass consumption, and make it more rarefied and difficult. And coupled with the general movement into FV, this desire has proved all too catastrophically successful.
For most general readers now, the word "poetry" implies a little heap of words you have to work at like a cryptic crossword puzzle, and if you don't "get it" (such poems imply) then the fault is all yours (you pea-brain). So, instead of having their intelligence put on trial, they choose to avoid the impertinent encounter altogether.
But beyond this, there seems to be a general lack of interest in the element of the poetic in society today. People seem to have no need for the poetic - which I find truly frightening.
This spiritual aridity, based on a life dedicated to getting and spending, and almost nothing else, seems to have no need for poetic insight into life. They can get on very well without poetry.
For most people today, life seems to be nothing more than a good business opportunity. And such people have no need for poetry in any shape or form.
Before there can be a new poetry, there will have to be a new world, with a different vision of what life is about.
I don't believe that it is up to the poets to change - all they need is an audience which hungers for the poetic again.
[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited November 14, 2006).]
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