Re: Kafka and rilke and Perplexity State University

Heh...yes, you have a point there. You're right that for every Donne
there were plenty of bad poets, even back then. I guess the difference
now is exposure -- the best stuff from the past is always easily
accessible, while the crap from the 16/17th centuries is really only
read by scholars. Contemporary poetry, though, is out there for
everyone, and probably more so than it ever has been in the past.

I hadn't considered HBO as a venue for poetry. I don't get it, so I
don't know how often Def Poetry Jams are aired or what kind of ratings
they get. I think it's a good thing in that it brings poetry to the
mass public again. But, I suspect the venue requires that the poetry
read have a certain kind of entertainment value. I'd bet you won't see
too much cummings-like poetry performed on TV, for example, and I
suspect many of the works performed don't read quite as good on paper.
I suspect the net result will be the wide dissemination of a certain
kind of poetry, probably resulting in a distinction between literary and
pop poetry, like we have a distinction between literary and genre
fiction (like romance novels and westerns) already.

Jim

Omlor@aol.com wrote:
> Hi Jim,
>
> You write:
>
> "The more widely I read contemporary poetry, the more bothered I am by
> what passes for poetry these days. A lot of it is crap."
>
> There's always been plenty of really bad poetry around, even in the days
> when your distinctions held in much more firm and fast ways. Every
> Victorian who had too much money and free time sat around writing bad
> verse. Heck, for every Donne, in his day, I'll bet there were crowds of
> clerical wannabes writing junk. That's nothing new, and I don't think
> the evolution of the genre is really increasing or decreasing the amount
> of bad stuff being written (though technology is certainly increasing
> the amount of stuff, good bad and indifferent, being published or
> otherwise made available to readers).
>
> And yes, I'm sure there is much more poetry "circulating in print" than
> being heard -- but that's not quite the same as how much is actually
> being read. You know how many people actually see an HBO program in
> prime time if you add up all the combined showings? We're talking many
> millions for each episode of each show. So I think the difference is
> not as overwhelming as it might be concerning just how much poetry is
> being heard these days compared to how much is actually being read
> (outside of classroom assignments, of course). Who knows...
>
> But it's no matter. I appreciate your personal preferences, even if I
> don't share them.
>
> All the best,
>
> --John (happy just have the new Annie Lennox wailing while he works)

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Received on Tue Jul 1 11:54:16 2003