poetry crises

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I have just been asked to write a paper on...
" What place does poetry have in contemporary culture?" ( I suppose looking at poets of the 20th and 21st Century...A.D. Hope, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, e.e.cummings etc)
This is such a HUGE topic...I don't know where to start. What do all you fabulous people in ILB think. help.

― kath (kath), Monday, 31 May 2004 23:48 (twenty-one years ago)

Hmmmm....Maybe you could start by debating IF it does indeed have a place and then move on to examples that demonstrated a purpose (recorded an event, heralded a new form, began an new era, etc) or influenced people (maybe throw in a timeline with pieces and how they mirrored the other arts/thinking/culture of their era). Or not.

― maybemike (mikel), Tuesday, 1 June 2004 01:44 (twenty-one years ago)

My argument is that poetry is a way of hearing language, of taking delight in the material aspects of language -- the sounds, the rhythms, the spellings, the way words can have multiple meanings, the way grammar pulls, the denotations and connotations and etymologies and all that stuff.

And I think this sense of poetry is alive and well, even if people aren't intested in the technical journals of poetry, the chapbooks and collected works of its technicians and theoreticians -- by which I mean, that which is usually thought of as "poetry".

So, you know, the poets of the 21st and especially the 20th century would be the last place I'd look. Look for other places in culture where people enjoy a thing which should be called poetry but which isn't.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Tuesday, 1 June 2004 06:29 (twenty-one years ago)

Poetry is more alive than ever in the rhymes of Hip-Hop and the poetry slams. Add the on-line poetry forums to that and you have as big or bigger a body of versifiers as ever. Try here. This link will lead you to others.

― Robert Burns, Tuesday, 1 June 2004 12:12 (twenty-one years ago)

A morsel of slam news.

― Robert Burns, Tuesday, 1 June 2004 12:34 (twenty-one years ago)

"what place does poetry have..."

I take that use of "place" to mean not "where is it being practiced" but "what is its role" which is kind of a whole other question.

what does poetry bring to the table?

― slow learner (slow learner), Tuesday, 1 June 2004 13:18 (twenty-one years ago)

" What place does poetry have in contemporary culture?"

If we are speaking of the USA, then we are speaking of 290 million people whose only common culture is loosely shared and based on public schooling and popular entertainment. Poetry has no influence on this culture whatsoever, unless one counts the lyrics of popular songs as our form of lyric poetry - which a reasonable assumption.

In the case of a school assignment, it may be advisable to suss out whether the instructor would have any sympathy for his argument, or whether, by "culture", said instructor meant that rarified and ever-marginalized tradition of 'high culture' that gets taught in university literature courses. If so, then you must crank out something that shows the proper spirit of narrow-minded exclusion and myopia.

NB: I happen to enjoy the rarified and ever-marginalized tradition of high culture and its poetry, but I am not deluded enough to think that poetry plays much of a defining role even in that incestuous and miniature world. In America, poetry doesn't really matter at all. This is not a matter for concern for poets, as it is beyond their power to change and it should not affect their interest in poetry. But for those poets who still yearn to be "unacknowledged legislators to the world", it is gall and wormwood. If that is their requirement, they must pick up a guitar and learn to write hit songs. Those folks really are the unacknowledged legislators these days.

A frank acknowledgement of this plain fact might earn you an A... with the right teacher.

― Aimless (Aimless), Tuesday, 1 June 2004 16:05 (twenty-one years ago)

Read Poetry. It's Really Hard.

― cozen (Cozen), Tuesday, 1 June 2004 19:16 (twenty-one years ago)

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