I just saw, on my facebook page, a link to an article in Harpers called “Why is Modern Poetry So Bad” and I wrote the following comment just in reply to the headline, because that says it all. I did go back and read the article before I hit the send button, but the problem there is that commentary on modern poetry tends to be just as boring and pedantic as modern poetry.
You throw them into the air and, however they come down, you call it a poem
Anyway, here was my comment: Modern poetry is like women. Modern poetry is like TV. Modern poetry is like rows and rows and rows of apartment buildings. Modern poetry is like lawyers, or teachers. Some modern poetry is horrible, some modern poetry is wonderful, original, inspiring, the kind of poetry that you read and say, now THAT is what poetry should be like just like sometimes you meet a woman and say, now THAT is what a woman should be like, sometimes you see a TV show and say, now THAT is what TV should be like, sometimes you will step into a friend’s apartment and look at the decor and say WOW, I wish I’d thought of that, sometimes you will read about a lawyer, or a teacher, and think there is hope for the world after all. But, yeah, most of it is crap.
The thing is, with the advent of social media and self-publishing, the number of writers has exploded and I can’t complain because without social media and self-publishing, I wouldn’t be in the game, either. It means that there are thousands, maybe millions, of people who previously would have just been a bit eccentric and wrote down lots of disjointed thoughts in notebooks to be looked over briefly at some point in future by a disinterested distant relative after your funeral and then burned, who now are officially poets.
So, of course most of us aren’t very good.
Still, the large numbers mean you will find an occasional gem. You just have to keep looking.
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