Come on, critics, gather round. Time for me to post some Big Theory on the state of poetry in our time. Feel free to argue with me — I am so likely to be off-base about this that I need a good humdinging bus-down row.
It occurs to me that our era, with the push-pull of denial of climate change and faith and disbelief and evolution and creation and war, isn’t all that different from the great eras which incubate great poetry. There’s something that’s happened in English poetry (poetry written in English, that is) that seems to be connected with the turns of our centuries for the last two and a half centuries or so, and it’s this: first, there’s a time of great revolution where big things — plays and novels, say — get produced, but when the poetry is not so great. And then, in the wake of that revolution, which may have begun with the industrial revolution (1750s), but might have begun even earlier, with the Tudor conquest of the Plantagenets (though I don’t know enough about Restoration literature to say), you get a major poetry period. Of course, the Elizabethan/Jacobean period had theatre and poetry flourishing together, but after that, not so much: there are the essays and poetry of the Dryden-Pope period, and then that’s followed by the genesis of novels, which is then followed by the Romantic era (all lyrical and poetical), which gives way to a golden century of long fiction and so-so poets, and then another revolution with poems and plays and novels all happening at once (the turn of the last century and the inter-war era). Television and film dilute this somewhat, I suppose. Poetry really hasn’t seen a great era much since the Modernists, the last of them dying just after the Second World War; what follows is far more cerebral and self-conscious and — frankly — either boring or mediocre or both, the best being either chatty or polemic, and short-lived.
But we’re living through an era of huge change. This radical shift in the delivery of information, I suspect, is going to lead us into an era of great poetry. Already the internet is creating constellations of poets who are doing stuff that’s stirring, not simply competent or correct. In a couple of decades, who knows?
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“I do believe the next era of poetry will come not from further innovations of form, but from an evolution of the sensibility based on lived experience.
Groundbreaking new art comes when artists make a changed assumption about their relationship to their audience, talk to their readers in a new way, and assume they will understand.”
American Poetry in the New Century by John Barr
http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0906/comment_178560.html
“Slam poets have infiltrated MFA programs. They are teaching in universities. They are shaping the next great poetry movement”
The Poem Performed by Felice Belle
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/oral_tradition/v018/18.1belle.pdf
“Increasingly our inner ear is failing. The echo chambers of our minds are becoming silent – children can leave school, or indeed university, without hearing some of the greatest lines ever written- written mostly to be ‘sounded out’.”
Poetry should be heard and not seen by Josephine Hart
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/10/the_spoken_word_why_poetry_sho.html
“…. in a country of multiple colliding realities – of cutting-edge Information Technology and starvation deaths, of Bollywood and the Babri Masjid – there is clearly no dearth of challenges to provoke the poetic imagination.”
Welcome to Indian poetry – May 2004 by ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM
http://india.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=2705&x=1
“… the forces of cross-pollination are driven not merely by industrialization, but also by the revolution in information technology and international corporate mega-engines. The social and cultural changes in the last quarter of the previous century are no less breathless and many young poets have a feeling that the gestalt needs to be broken again.”
Live Update: A Brief Introduction to New Marathi Poetry by Sachin Ketkar
http://india.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=2682&x=1
Intriguing. It’s a bit the like the history of literature equivalent to technical trading (ignoring the fundamentals of the stock in favor of looking at purely graphical patterns in how it trades).
I wonder how much the “clumping” of technological innovation in the last hundred years has skewed the pattern. We had hundreds of years of ink on paper and spoken words delivered in person, and that was the end of it. And then we sped through telegraphs, telephone, radio, television, and now we have the web, not to mention the incredible diminution, portability, and now interactivity of the receivers of those media. So it will be interesting to see if, going forward, our latest gadgetry reinforces your idea or complicates it.
I’m betting on the former. Anyone can make a motion picture now and distribute it worldwide for very little. So I think the rules have a chance to break in favor of poetry. There were a lot of economic reasons for the 90 to 120 minute film distrubuted in theaters, and many of those reasons have gone away. We’re seeing the advent of the 2- to 3-minute web film via Youtube and other outlets, and I think there’s a chance that poetry has found a new platform that can energize it; the just might feed off each other in the way the three-minute song met the 45 rpm record.
RANDOM REACTIONS.
1. Not so much the turning of centuries as the experiencing of seismic societal changes at whatever point they might occur. If poetry trails socio-cultural change it’s because of its reflective nature – it kicks in when immediate rational, analytical perceptions give way to the need to apprehend the nature of experience on a deeper level.
2. ‘So-so poets’. Tennyson, the Brownings, Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley-Hopkins..?
3. No great movements since the Modernists. Where would you place the Beats? Their influence in respect of the liberation both of thematic content & language itself is felt still.
This is what I’m thinking, Sefton.
Dick, I’m going to betray my personal preferences here. I’m not inclined to place any of the poets you listed in the same category as the Romantics or the Modernists, with the possible exceptions of Whitman, who was American and spoke with a very different voice, and Hopkins, who was proto-Modernist, like Hardy. I find the Victorians competent, but lacklustre as poets. Their overriding tendency is questioning and doubt, which makes for pretty laboured poetry, IMO; and while Shelley’s never really moved me much, there’s little to touch Keats and Coleridge and the best of Byron and Wordsworth till Pound, Eliot, Yeats & Auden. I find the Victorians too cerebral. Tennyson’s at his best when he’s wrestling with the Big Ideas of the century — the work that speaks most to me is “In Memoriam”, where he uses elegy to explore doubt and change. Dover Beach does the same thing. Browning’s more fun, agreed, but he’s not in the same class as Keats before him or Yeats after. The Beats fit a similar mould, to my mind. Their poetry, like that of the Victorians, seems to be more reaction than action, if you know what I mean in a literary sense.
If you don’t, I’ll be thinking about it to see whether I can be more specific in time.