Why Doesn't Anyone Read Poetry?

Back in 1992, poet Dana Gioia summed up the place of poetry in the contemporary culture like this:

American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. Like priests in a town of agnostics they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists, they are almost invisible.

It's hard to disagree with this assessment. But why? Whatever you think of Andy Warhol and Frank Gehry millions of people know who they are. No American poet since Robert Frost has achieved anything like that level of fame. Writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review, William Childress says the problem is free verse, especially in the low culture style exemplified by the Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats:

A few years after reading the lyrical beauty of a poem that could make me feel good, even about death, came Howl, Allen Ginsberg’s nihilistic free verse oral diarrhea—and suddenly the world was supposedly singing the praises of Ginsberg’s drug-poisoned pals, who

let themselves be fucked in the ass
by saintly motorcyclists
and screamed with joy
who blew and were blown by those human seraphims, the sailors

Howlin’ Allen has the right to describe the rotting sowbelly of life, but I have the right to say it’s pointless, and as far from real poetry as shit is from Chanel #5. Beat poetry went far toward making ordinary Americans see poets as drug-crazed society-wreckers who wrote only for themselves. By definition, that makes them elitists.

I researched a large stack of Beat poetry magazines from the 1970s and 1980s for this post, ranging from Doug Blazek’s Olé Anthology to Kumquat 3 and E.V. Griffith’s highly touted Hearse (“A Vehicle for Conveying the Dead”). Not only were 95 percent of the poems free verse, many of them hewed to a core of societal destruction that in another era would sound like fascism. It was an argument for too much freedom encouraging anarchy. Vitriol was plentiful, but ways to improve things were not.

A blind person can see that American society is in turmoil, with a fractured government and enormous debt. Both political parties are to blame—but shouldn’t poets be trying to change things instead of writing chaos-poetry or “woe is me” diaries? Who will read poetry when they can’t find a common bond in a poet’s writing? Who likes ruptured grammar, twisted syntax and what my grandpa called flapdoodle? There’s at least a partial consensus that free verse these days consists of a lot of bad writing. I forget who said, “Poets should learn to write before they try to write poetry.” Many of today’s poets don’t seem to realize that all writing is connected.

Here’s another example of free verse:

Clench-Watch:
Fear-spores in-coil taut
(and calm) as copper-snakes
or-springs—before they cause.

I don't know that free verse is entirely to blame, since there have been lots of formalist poets over the past 50 years. (Including William Childress.) But surely the end of poetry as something sung contributes to the malaise Childress and Gioia point to. After all, the most widely loved poets of the past 50 years have been the ones who set their verses to music, or rapped it to a hip-hop rhythm. And before you start in on the "Bob Dylan is no poet" rant, answer me this: what good is art, no matter how sophisticated, that nobody ever sees or hears?

Poetry has become an insider's game, and it will remains so until poets make a real effort to engage the sort of people who listen to Leonard Cohen, Tupac, and Paul McCartney.