Poetry is Dead, Long Live Poetry

As a poet, I have very mixed feelings about an article I read, recently, titled: How Instagram Saved Poetry

What does it mean for the state of poetry, I wonder, that Rupi Kaur, a 25-year-old Canadian Insta-poet, outsold Homer two years ago? Kauer's first collection, milk & honey, has been translated into 40 languages and has sold 3.5 million copies, stealing the position of best-selling poetry book from The Odyssey!

Moreover, this sobering article in the Atlantic goes on to inform us that

12 of the top 20 best-selling poets last year were Insta-poets... This year, according to a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Census Bureau, 28 million Americans are reading poetry—the highest percentage of poetry readership in almost two decades.

This, of course, is the upside. That these social media stars are helping sales of all poets, classics and contemorary alike--but at what cost?

It’s, certainly, humbling and a learning experience as I see it—a shift in public taste as well as a generational drift...

Naturally, contempt is easy and jealousy, too. I understand both sentiments and, at such times, I think of Nietzsche’s quip about most people preferring copies to masterpieces (an old argument, no doubt). But screeching is not the best mode of teaching; just as contempt and compassion are not compatible.

So, the question remains, past the sneering, how does this represent an opportunity for seasoned poets? What can we learn; even, where have we failed, gotten lazy or self-absorbed that we are not engaging the youth and masses?

Interestingly, this is not simply restricted to literature, but to spirituality, too — where everyone is a life coach... In a spiritually-hungry and impatient age, the student is mistaken for a teacher.

My feeling is that, if one is truly original or profound,
no need to bemoan prevailing mediocrity or our vacuous times... their work will stand out in relief.

In the final equation, craft is everything. Since my late teens I’ve viewed literature as a calling and vocation & sacrificed everything for its sake.

At some point, we look up & around to figure out how best to get the work out into the world. But, our first and last concern is honing our craft.

In closing, these extraordinary words from a master poet:

For the sake of Poetry:

You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences.

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning.

You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quite, retrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.

You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises.

And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important.

Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

—Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Art: Death angel