To feel Poetry has died a death in modern society?

[Marmitemother]

Out of curiosity I searched MN expecting to find a topic page on poetry and literature....have I missed it somewhere?

Semi retired, children flown the nest, hubbie and I always busy with projects yet still find time to read poetry most days.

I'm wondering if others, particularly younger folk (we're in our 60's) didn't learn to appreciate poetry at school or just don't have time or the inclination to read, share and discuss compared to all else available these days (TV, phones, cinema, social media etc)

I read The Journey by Mary Oliver this morning and thought about how it spoke to many posting on the Relationship page.

“One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.”

I'm in my 60s with an English degree and I dislike poetry.

I enjoyed poetry as a young adult and then forgot all about it as it were.

My Ds is taking public speaking exams and for his latest one, he has to also read a poem of his choosing. He's 17, hated poetry for GCSE, and isn't an avid reader any more. So when he came to me looking for poetry, we fell down the most glorious rabbit hole.

Our local bookshop have been brilliant in guiding us, I've bought lots of poetry in the last few months, and listened to a lot too.

We're besotted with Liz Berry. He's going to read one of her poems, either Birmingham Roller or Gosty Hill. We're from the Midlands, so she really captured our imaginations.

My mil gave me a poetry collection, called something like poems for women in middle age. There was a superb 4 line poem in there that made me laugh out loud. I'm getting ready for work now, but when I get home later I'll post it.

The bookshop said that poetry seems to be having a resurgence and they're selling more poetry now than ever before. I mean, I'm sure we've helped with that, but not to that extent!

I wouldn't call Mary Oliver good poetry tbh. Far too much naff stuff like that around. But poems on the underground are a good example of interesting stuff in the public realm and schools often have interesting poems up.

I liked some poetry growing up and read it at times because I thought it was intellectual which I wanted to be. There were individual poems I genuinely loved too, Laurie Lee and Louis MacNeice.Dh loved poetry and wrote it, so I went to a lot of poetry events. Certainly didn't seem to be dying to me, far from it.Then dh died, and poetry was all I could read. I couldn't concentrate enough for a long narrative, but also it was as though I suddenly found out what it was for. It didn't seem too complex, it was reporting from a spiritual reality that isn't exactly like physical reality (and I'm the most stony hearted of atheists).The poem that was with me most of all was by Peter Porter after the suicide of his first wife. This is an extract.The channels of our lives are blocked,The hand is stopped upon the clockNo one can say why hearts will breakAnd marriages are all opaque:A map of loss, some posted cardsThe living house reduced to shardsThe abstract hell of memoryThe pointlessness of poetry —These are the instances which tellOf something which I know full wellI owe a death to you — one dayThe time will come for me to pay

Urgh that had paragraphs!

Personally- as an English Lit teacher - schools being restricted to heritage poetry has turned young people off poetry. 17th century romantic poems are never going to resonate with a bored teenager

English lit was an optional GCSE at my school 30 years ago, which I did not choose, and we never studied much poetry before that. When I read some of the stuff my friends were studying, I was very glad I wasn't.

Later I read some 20th century poetry and loved it, and it really annoyed me that there was all this more recent and relatable stuff that we'd never been introduced to.

Apart from studying Jabberwocky for what seemed like an entire term, I don't recall studying poetry at secondary school. Primary school was entirely different though and we were always reading and writing poetry.

I like a lot of poetry, old and new, but it was taught appallingly badly at my school. Guaranteed to put any kid off. Unfortunately it seems that hasn’t changed much.

Sorry, that's just the sort of thing I avoid, not my cup of tea.

I adore poetry. Pretty much daily. But I hate to analyse it so much.

When you ask people if they like poetry - it's an odd question as it's such a diverse genre.

My ds 22 is a poetry nut. Every time I send him something he has already listened or read it.

Some rap is poetry and some not.

https://onbeing.org/series/poetry-unbound/page/2/]

This is an excellent short podcast that gives analysis without going all technical. I adore it and recently went to see Padraig O'Tuama - what a night!

@Marmitemother Have you heard this quite rare Mary Oliver interview- it's brilliant https://onbeing.org/programs/mary-oliver-i-got-saved-by-the-beauty-of-the-world/

St Gertrude’s, Sidcup

Nuns, now: ladies in black hoods for teachers – surely that was surprising?

It seems not. It was just England: like houses made of brick, with stairs, and dark skies, and Christmas coming in winter, and there being a war on.

I was five, and unsurprisable –

except by nasty dogs, or the time

When I ran to catch the bus from school and my knickers fell down in the snow.

That's the sort of thing that would've hooked me in at school, not some airy fairy stuff about a bird.

If only modern poetry readings
that perform
consonant cunnilingus
with written words
would
d
i
e.

Poetry,
written as prose,
dividing sentences

randomly

SHOULD BE READ AS PROSE!

I think school taught me to dislike poetry rather than appreciate it. Studying for exams takes all the pleasure out of learning. My 15 year old is doing the Love & Relationships poetry for GCSE- it's quite interesting to me (about all types of love, not just romantic)- but i'm 55. It is MEANINGLESS and IRRELEVANT to my teenage boy. He will think that all poetry is meaningless and irrelevant -- which will probably switch him off for life. Good job Education!!!!!
I usually don't get what the poem is conveying. Once you've been told, you can understand it but it's like a secret code - in terms of technical form, symbolism etc you've got to already be in the know for. Quite elitist.

I'm being silly, but only a bit. I can't stand modern poetry readings because they're all the same. Syllables are laboured earnestly and it's always "recited" with a walking bass of smugness and/or a sort of entitled outrage.

Often when they're written down, they're better.

It's like what makes a poetry recital a recital is the way the words are read, and everybody has to read the same way, regardless of what they read. It could be a Daily Mail article!

There is some highly skilled rap.

And there a book of bird poetry including one called Jackdaw Rap. I can't find the book any more, or remember the authors, but it's an absolute gem!

@chyra @TuisealGinideach I don't understand the hate for Mary Oliver. Pulitzer prize winning poetry. Always been fashionable to diss her (maybe because she appeals to middle-aged women...) but to me she seems like she's writing in a much longer Romantic/Whitman tradition.

It’s perfectly permissible to find Pulitzer-winning works not to your taste, surely. I don’t like Norman Mailer either. Or Anne Smiley.

This is, of course, the fundamental problem when teaching literature. These sorts of poems would have turned me off entirely at school (and, indeed, now). At school, I enjoyed Shakespeare, Beowulf, Chaucer and a lot of the same classic formal poetry which a lot of other posters found dull and interminable. No school can cater to every child's taste, and every choice of text will infuriate some, while pleasing others.

Fortunately at my school we did cover a range of styles and poets which meant that, while I hated some of them, I was also aware that there were others I loved.

My husband recently took me to see John Cooper Clarke perform some poems and it was amazing! There was another poet called Luke Wright who started the show off and he was equally as good. It really made me enjoy poetry and I've bought some books recently.

@Piseog agreed, of course people find Pulitzer-winning works not to their taste. But it's just the sneery way in which people call Mary Oliver naff, hallmark stuff, 'poyums' as someone's written earlier in the thread - seems to imply a value judgement instead of a personal dislike.

I actually do believe @NeverDropYourMooncup that all art, music, literature and architecture, is the art of enclosing space. The space in which we live, the distance between us, as people, or the distance between us and the natural world.

It's an attempt at meaning, of breaching the unknowable space with connection that we as humans can understand.

Of course, that man was a twat an worded it badly. And it's quite obvious that music too breaches the unfathomable space.

Hence the space will always be just out of his grasp. His loss.

I agree W B Yeats is amazing. 'Leda and the Swan' is often thought to be one of the most technically brilliant examples of the English sonnet form ever written. 'Sailing to Byzantium' is another beaut - obviously got under Cormac McCarthy's skin since he pinched its first line for one of his titles - but my personal favourite is 'Easter 1916'.

And some of James Joyce's stuff might have been written as prose but is every bit as lyrical as poetry. I really love the Irish modernists.

I actually think it’s wider, it’s about imagination dying a death. My favourite poets are Blake and Coleridge. Both held imagination up in divine terms. Schooling and wider society has devalued imagination. It’s seen as childish, unscientific, frivolous and unworthy. In short Newtons Sleep is the MO of modern society.

As a result, real empathy and ability to step outside our own perspective has been damaged.

Far from cleansing out doors of perception the soma of modern society has clouded them further.

A Brave New World indeed.

Luckily I’ve found a group of people who value the imagination very highly indeed.

Imagination hasn't died a death. It may now be exercised more now in different and accessible genres - most obviously science fiction and fantasy. Imagined worlds in books and on the screen. Some of it is pap, but not all of it. I really don't agree that it's all 'seen as childish, unscientific, frivolous and unworthy.'

Ha! @OMG12.

That's quite funny.

Blake and Coldridge did hit some high notes, under the auspices of masculinity, opium and education that may have been beyond their intelligence.

And then to drop Aldous Huxley, another drug-addled, educated man as your reference point?

This is your apogee? Your zenith?

This is your reference for the best expression of the educated and searching mind?

I pity you.

Is this how Blake felt when he was talking to a thistle🤔

I think with the educational system it has!!