Most People Ignore Most Poetry Because Most...

[gerard]

...poetry ignores most people.

There's a debate going on about this at the guardian books blog site. What are your views on this?

www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/26/was-adrian-mitchell-right-about-why-people-ignore-poetry

[colindardis]

Well, you could apply similar logic and say that the whole sci-fi genre ignores people because it doesn't reflect real life. In fact, any fiction could be considered a betrayal to humanity, given extreme enough views. Art and literature is revelant to those who wish to find revelance in it. If it doesn't speak to sectors of society, that doesn't mean that said art is worthless.

[gerard]

I see your point but I think poetry is the worst culprit. The parameters academia especially tries to place on poetry by deeming some things worthy and others not are where it fails. The criteria for worthy poetry sometimes lets some completely indulgent crap to be lauded while work that is trying to do something different or discover new modes is dismissed as unworthy (eg the majority of performance poetry).

[pilotdime]

The state of poetry these days is pitiable, the vast majority being largely unreadable. The language is mostly dead, the ideas drab and commonplace. Heaney and his imitators have as much to answer for as the academics, a bunch of old farts who seem resistant to any sense of vitality, fire or youth. Was Heaney ever truly young? He's not the only offender, in fairness. The dribbling rhetoric of "poetry speak" has infiltrated almost every contemporary poet of note, and the emotional range it offers is laughable: the choice these days seems to be sentimentality or defeatism

Faun's flesh is not to us
Nor the saint's vision

Something's got to be done.

[Marcus]

Jan 30, 2009 0:07:02 GMT 1 pilotdime said:

Something's got to be done.

The natural response is just to plough onwards with performing and writing as normal and hope that some sort of recognition will be gained. Although I feel that a list of names, dates, times and gigs, coupled with bottles of pish and rat's blood would harbour a more satisfying result.

[oceanangel]

i dont feel peotry ignores people in the sense if its not your thing it just isn't, just like every other genre in every other medium.

But i think Gerard is right in what is deemed worthy poetry, my opinion on that particular problem, is that poetry has changed ,wording wise in the 21st century and encompasses many more techniques and this is what could be appealing to our youthful generation being introduced to the world of poetry and indeed performance poetry, don't you think.

[eugene]

That is true. Language and how people use it is changing (as it's always been changing). Some poetry doesn't allow or accept this and some poets look down on it.

[paddy]

I don't think that poetry ignores people. I feel that poetry has become "ghettocised" and available to a limited number of people, the "usual" people in the "usual" places. The dying out of oral tradition within the home and the community has, in my opinion, meant that people have fewer opportunities to encounter poetry. As a child I remember going to aunts and uncles and having to say my "piece". Usually there was someone who could play an instrument, someone who could sing, someone good at telling stories and of course a bard who would recite either his own work or some famous poet's work. Nowadays to come across poetry you have to go somewhere, usually somewhere which would be considered by most as in an intellectual space. I would yes, plough on, but would look for openings where "the people" would have more access to poetry in places where they don't feel intimidated. A place I thought was excellent was the Central Library in the maiden city which Jen organised. Some of the people there were perhaps not the sort most of you would be seen with ie of a certain age. The evening was good, the quality of the poetry mixed but there was no elitism, no primadonnas, no "i'm-a-poet-so-I-drink-ism", just poetry meeting the people.

Pardon my use of speech marks ... I'm on a downer and intellectually lazy

[silverfox]

As a side note, there is medium's and way's to which people will try to get their stuff out to the wider audience. But alas, I find that poetry isn't specifically for the wider audience. it's for the wider occasion.

Poetry usually describes a feeling, or a place, or an event, much like song, and as such for it to hit a bell with people, it needs an event for it to relate to people. Otherwise, the poem just won't connect.

Eminem for one is a rapper, but he relates in his rhymes to a wider audience because his comedy/desperation comes out of his words. and besides the swearing and lying about killing this and that, he does hide clever meanings behind his stuff. But I bet that if you ask an established poet what he thinks about him, and the reply would be one of probable disdain.

Thus I will conclude my mini side rant with this. How come a performance poet will get a better round of applause than a carefully written piece? The answer is simple, because people also see what the poet is doing. and unless the written piece is performed with empathy then it just fades in comparison.

Some more food for thought there.

[paddy]

i take back practically all of my previous comment
it smacks of philip larkin
and i can't stand his bringing poetry to the masses
why on earth should people be spoon fed with easy words and in your face images
why
people do not ignore poetry
ok they may not have access to it as much as people in the past did ie before tv the internet etc
if radio were still the force it was in the past
perhaps poetry would be more accessible
there is no need to bring poetry to the level of the everyman
the everyman is not totally insensitive
most people have an epiphany at some stage in their lives
i like to think that most people have it while looking at a painting
or listening to a poem
or reading one
or maybe
songs are are contemporary poems
if that be the case
then perhaps we're damned to wallow in larkinism
ugh
ugh
ugh

[gerard]

For the record I like Larkin. I do agree that we shouldn't have to aim for mass appeal (which generally means dumbing down) but for me a lot of the main presses: Faber, Carcanet etc aren't the ones releasing the cutting edge interesting work. It's the smaller presses like Penned In The Margins and Tall Lighthouse that are doing that, or even more interestingly, self published chap books.

[mark]

Wow, most people have always ignored poetry because they are sturdy hunter gatherers with little taste for the sublime, whereas poetrey emanates from the soft-minded shamanistic minority. However, most people ignore fishing, politics, quantum mechanics, the english language and almost everything else except for sex and walking. We live in a global cultural matrix of minority tastes, and only the delusional would wish their own path to be followed by the majority.
If however, as mentioned in the original article, you think poetry is irrelevant to real politik and social progress, how come the world's repressive regimes have always had poets as political prisoners. Poets are dangerous because they speak of individual, rather than societal experience. Personally, I write down what comes out, blissfully unaware of any agenda of exclusion or inclusion.
I didn't write anything so clever as the Pisan Cantos, but neither was I caged in the middle of a field as an insane war criminal by Italians. Pounds reputation didn't grow, it was carved by him and cleverly marketed by his closet camp acolytes.

[Séamus]

For a start the statement is worded strangely how can "poetry" ignore anything the word poets would be much more apt. The simple fact of the matter is that the peotry taught in schools is not very vibrant or exciting so most people grow up with a bad vision of poetry. This coupled with the fact that the last thing most people who leave school want to do is anything remotely resembling school work.

Often as well as we've all witnessed people are quite stand offish when you're doing something that's considered "high brow" How many times have you heard "are you still writng your wee poems?" SLAP! It is not taken seriously because most people don't consider it to be anything other than a hobby when all the dumbasses need to is look how many books get published to realise that some people can make a career from writing.

Society has a collective inferiority complex so anyone who stands out from the crowd invites ridicule.

Look at rap music and how popular it is to modern culture rap is actually a form of spoken word but people don't get spoken word because of that inherant fear that society has of what they consider to be "Poetry"

Most people tend to just stick with what they get comfortable with and fear trying anything new.

[tk]

It's strange that the good poets don't speak out that the crap is getting pushed to the front.

[Séamus]

Things have changed in the last few hundred years, back then we would have been the scribes for royalty, but seriously I'd rather be "FREE" and do my own thing. The bards back then were like Newscasters as well as entertainers.

New forms of Media are now touted because they make larger populations of people easier to control but poetry is still enjoyed by a large number of us and to be truthful the Government lets it all go as long as you have a smile on your face they keep running to the bank! Write anything subversive and as long as you have caused no direct violence or whispered in anothers ear to do it there's not much they can do about it (Within reason, if they want to they will!)