My new "Poetry Is Doomed" column is up!

[scottwoods]

I've been slacking so this month's column it's a bit of a two-fer: the Olympic poet gets some love and the passing of one of the great poets, Lucille Clifton, gets some holler.

http://gotpoetry.com/News/article/sid=49767.html

Comments

[scottwoods]

You raise an interesting perspective.

I think if we ever only measure the greatness of poetry by how old it is or its appearance and effect during things like wartime we do a disservice to it in the now. And if you let inner-city children in the door, then on some level an audience of 3 billion people has to trump some aspect of that. I doubt they had that many togas in the audience back in Greece.

Poetry waxes and wanes; it is not always communally great or socially significant in the general sense. Personally, always; generally, no. The art has stock, and its value dips and rises just like anything else. It is important for its practitioners to note when that stock rises and falls and I see no crime in suggesting that having a poem at the Olympics in this day and age is a big deal. Whatever made it a big deal before Christ didn't last long enough to affect the now, so it has to keep striving for that platform of greatness all of the time.

But I agree (and coyly suggest as much in the article): these occasions deserve our best poems. The problem is that the people who might be able to discern which poems or poets those are aren't the people in control of who gets on stage. And of COURSE I agree that a fuller study in the history of poetry in all its forms is something we should be impressing on our peers and our audiences. But I'm not willing to throw Shane and 3 billion people under the bus to make that point today.