Jerry:
I have been the student you describe. Unfortunately, I have also been the teacher who bungled the high duty of handing poetry on.
Most of the responsibility for the declne in popular appreciation of poetry, though, probably can't be attributed to bad college instruction. If people reach college age and don't care about poetry (or have even decided they hate it), a great teacher may make a difference with a few students, but not with many. The insularity of college literature courses is probably as much an effect of the general indifference to literature as a cause of it.
For me, the problem with a lot, even most, of contemporary big-name poetry isn't merely that it eschews form. It is, I think, the absolute terror of anything that could be construed as sentiment. The proscription against sentimentality is so strong that many poets avoid expressing any recognizable feeling at all. What's left? Word games, but not particularly fun ones, and clever allusions. There may be feeling lurking in there somewhere, but it's so evasive, ironic, or self-referential that I never connect with it.
You can hear this in the way many, many poets read their stuff aloud. The have an affectless intonation, or lack of intonation, that makes them sound like they're afflicted with anhedonia.
Still, there's lots of emotionally rich poetry out there, written by people who are good are performing it. People who want to hear contemporary poetry shouldn't really have any trouble finding something to their taste. They sure don't when it comes to music, fiction, or film!
Richard
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