Prose about poetry. A few years back, my church held a celebration of the arts. We were invited to bring personal art works for sale at our national gathering. I brought some CD’s and some booklets of poetry. I sold some CD’s but hardly any poetry booklets. By way of consolation, one minister told me that people just aren’t reading poetry anymore. He told me that poetry is a lost art. About a year ago, I placed 3 of my poetry books on the “local writers'” shelf at a bookstore near where I live. One book is gone, to date. I sadly had to agree with the minister, that poetry is a lost art.
Then I noticed other evidence. In my own blogging, I usually get a better response of likes when I post a poem, rather than when I post prose. I visit the sites of the likes I receive, and, to my surprise, there are a lot of people out there also writing poetry. Good poetry. I also used to go to a late night coffee shop which held a poetry night once a month. There was usually quite a good turnout for these poetry nights, and there were a lot of local poets sharing their verses. I found out that there are other coffee shops in town which do the same thing. And I have to mention hip-hop. While some of the rhymes are simple, there is strong rhythm, and solid rhyme.
Then there are those university poetry journals. Wallace Stevens started the trend to write verse that an ordinary reader can’t understand. I am an educated reader, otherwise ordinary, and I can’t understand these poems. I don’t mean that the ideas are complicated, or that they use big words–like T. S. Eliot, whom I do understand. Rather, the verses are not ordinary sentences, with subjects, verbs, and objects. The poets I’m talking about deliberately craft sentences in which the words don’t go together. Why they would want to do that, I don’t understand, don’t care to understand. But the poetry I read online, that I listen to in the coffee houses, that I hear in hip-hop songs I do understand, care to understand.
Robert Frost said that strong feeling is the beginning of poetry. With the cultural apathy we seem to be surrounded by, I find strong feeling in the poetry that I encounter. Underneath the political rhetoric, the apparent nonchalance of people you run into, the apathy to organized religion, there is strong feeling. One poet writes, “Indifference is by far the least/I have to fear of man or beast.” I disagree. Indifference is a virus that infects the human spirit and leads to spiritual death. But if poetry lives, humans live. Poetry lives because humans live. And that minister wasn’t right. Poetry isn’t moribund. It is alive, lively; it lives.
David Fekete 