[Roger Slater]

Worth a look.

[Richard Meyer]

Thanks for the link, Roger. An interesting read.

[Chris O'Carroll]

Poetry was long ago shoved aside in schools. In colleges it’s often easier to find courses on race or class or gender than on the Augustans or Romantics. In high schools and grade schools, when poetry is taught at all, too often it’s as a shudder of self-expression, without any attempt to look at the difficulties and majesties of verse and the subtleties of meaning that make poetry poetry. No wonder kids don’t like it — it becomes another way to bully them into feeling “compassion” or “tolerance,” part of a curriculum that makes them good citizens but bad readers of poetry.

Even Logan should be able to write a paragraph that sounds more in contact with reality than that.

[Claudia Gary]

I like this paragraph the best, in pragmatic terms:

"THE idea that poetry must be popular is simply a mistake. Yet who would have suspected that the Metropolitan Opera and the National Theatre in London would now be broadcast to local movie theaters across America? The cigar-chewing promoter who can find a way to put poetry before readers and make them love it will do more for the art than a century of hand-wringing. He might also turn a buck."

Yes, Mr. Promoter, go for it!

[Wintaka]

William Logan wrote:

"My blue-sky proposal: teach America’s kids to read by making them read poetry."

Well, first we'd have to take away their IPods to prevent them from listening to it.

Or does he consider song lyrics prose?

-o-

[David Danoff]

Typical for Logan (and I'm generally a fan), a lot of hyperbole that seems to be intended mostly for comic purposes.

I can't say if I agree or disagree, since his "argument" seems more or less self-canceling. He appears to be saying both that it doesn't really matter if poetry stays a minority, elite art, which is what it's always been...but also that school children should be frog-marched through Dante, Catullus, Anne Carson, et al., and what a wonderful world that would yield. (And also: somersaults and lizards.)

I come away concluding: he's mostly just having fun here, playing with contrasting ideas and showing off his wit. There's not much in the way of opinion in this opinion piece.

[Allen Tice]

NOT Anne Carson (or a lot of her).

[Ed Shacklee]

And the age ended, and the last deliverer died
In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe:
The sudden shadow of the giant’s enormous calf
Would fall no more at dusk acrosss the lawn outside.

They slept in peace: in marshes here and there no doubt
A sterile dragon lingered to a natural death,
But in a year the spoor had vanished from the heath;
The kobold’s knocking in the mountain petered out.

Only the sculptors and the poets were half sad,
And the pert retinue of from the magician’s house
Grumbled and went elsewhere. The vanquished powers
XXXwere glad

To be invisible and free: without remorse
Struck down the sons who strayed into their course,
And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.

XXX- W. H. Auden, In Time of War (XII)

[John Whitworth]

You can live a full life without a scrap of poetry. A full life? Full of what?

[Gillie Chriosd]

While I agree with William Logan's "blue-sky proposal" wholeheartedly, the way he made that proposal is, I think, part of the reason that nobody will actually do it. I discuss why in my response to Logan's op-ed, which is the first post of my new poetry blog:

http://theoldfolk.weebly.com/duende--lyric