In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* A Brief History of Poetry in America
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“Poetry, which before had been words and emotion which I love, was suddenly presented as a puzzle to be decoded—one that a peon kid like me could not possibly understand.” Violet, in a comment on yesterday’s post. (She absolutely nailed it.)
A Brief History of Poetry in America
To lay a foundation of sorts, let me provide a brief history of which many are unaware. I should say up front that I admire well-written poetry, both metered and free verse.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter what I (or we) enjoy writing or reading; the simple fact is that the current poetry audience consists primarily of fellow poets, other writers, and the students held captive in university classrooms.
So what has happened to the American poetry audience?
There are many fine working poets in the United States, yet former U.S. Poet Laureate (2011-2012) Philip Levine, in his outgoing address to the Library of Congress, quipped, “Now that I’ve been poet laureate, I expect my book sales to soar to three, maybe four hundred.”
Levine was known for his gritty poems about working-class life. Of course, with no “interpretation” necessary.
Although the statement was intended as humor, it really isn’t that funny to those of us who have spent years studying to perfect our craft and trying to regain our audience.
Consider, until the 1960s, American poets enjoyed a broad market for their work and a wide readership that consisted of the everyday working people of America.
Many attribute the decline of the poetry audience to the advent of television, but America’s appetite for fiction hasn’t waned. The essay still enjoys a wide readership as well, albeit often in the guise of newspaper op-eds. So again, what’s happened to the poetry audience?
The poetry audience was so large in the early 1900s that poet Robert Frost, then a professor at the University of Michigan, was literally hounded from his job by enthusiastic students.
Owing to the popularity of his classes on how to write poetry, the university already had moved his classes to successively larger classrooms to accommodate new students. Eventually his classes were moved to the auditorium.
But when students began knocking on his door for advice on this line or that stanza at two and three o’clock in the morning, he folded under the unrelenting pressure and resigned.
Yet some fifty years later, U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov—considered by many literary critics to be Frost’s heir in the lineage of blank verse—was invited to lecture on poetry in that same auditorium at the University of Michigan.
Nobody even showed up.
It’s interesting to note that almost everyone has heard of Robert Frost, but almost nobody has heard of Howard Nemerov.
Yet Nemerov was twice named poet laureate of the United States and his Collected Works won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1978. (I recommend it. You can get a copy of The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov at Amazon or eBay or practically anywhere else.)
As I noted earlier, fiction and essays haven’t suffered a serious decline in readership, yet poetry can hardly garner an audience outside of the university classroom.
In fact, if you ask readers whether they read poetry, they shy away, most often mumbling about their inability to understand it.
Many otherwise voracious readers believe they need a special awareness to read and understand a poem, a fact that indicates to me that our poetry is to blame for the loss of its own audience. How did we manage to run them off?
At around the turn of the (previous) century, Ezra Pound and his compatriots began writing what would come to be called vers libre, or free verse.
It’s especially interesting to note that their sole intent, according to Pound himself, was to “shake up” the world of traditional poetics, especially to “bring contemporary language and rhythms to the poetry of the day.”
Unfortunately, and again by his own admission, Mr. Pound’s experiment went “terribly awry.” Soon, everyone who could hold a pen was writing free verse, or what they thought was free verse.
Because of the surface appearance of free verse—that of randomly broken lines of prose—attention to craft, especially the intentional use of meter, fell largely by the wayside.
In true free verse, the line breaks are intentional. But because the line breaks appeared to be random, readers and would-be poets began to ignore the basic unit of the poem: the poetic line.
After all, why should one bother learning the craft when apparently doing so was no longer required?
Beginning with the Beat Generation of the ‘40s and ‘50s and extending through the ’60s and into the ’70s, poets took free verse to a new plateau, writing works that were so obscure only the poets themselves could understand them.
Instead of using universally understood metaphors, for example, the poets might use strictly personal symbolism. For example, a poet might write the phrase “red-sashed water tower.”
The phrase made no sense in the context of the poem, but some professor would publish a paper saying the line meant “the Holocaust” or “a band of wandering minstrels” or something.
The point is, the symbolism was so personal that only the poet knew what it meant, if it actually meant anything other than a “red-sashed water tower,” which (again) didn’t make sense in the context of the poem. In other words, the line was nonsensical.
In turn, those works and the professor’s “interpretation” were taught in chic university classrooms, where the professors, who had to publish or perish, claimed to understand their meaning.
Then the professor would ask the class what the poem “meant.”
But no matter what any well-meaning student thought the poem meant, s/he was always pronounced wrong by the professor.
The result? Literature students were taught in droves that they were incapable of “interpreting” and understanding poetry. Only the poet—and the professor, of course, as proven by his ability to publish a paper on the subject and attain or retain tenure—could truly understand the “deeper meanings” of the poem.
Consequently, the mass audience for poetry dwindled because
- Readers will not spend good money on works that they’ve been taught they can’t begin to understand. After all
- Why should they buy and attempt to read something that makes them feel less intelligent? And finally,
- Those who did buy that poet’s work did so strictly for the sake of appearances: how very ‘cool’ they were.
So that brings us to the present.
How do we who are serious about the craft regain our poetry audience? How do we re-establish that trust? The answer is twofold:
- We must continue to study and learn the tools of our craft—not so we will always write traditional poetry, but so we have those tools available when we need them—and
- We must write accessible poetry, the kind of poetry readers can access and understand during the first reading.
That isn’t to say our works can’t hold mysterious “deeper meanings.” But how will the reader ever get to explore those deeper meanings if s/he’s frightened off the first time s/he attempts to read the poem?
The carpenter, the mason, and the plumber all learn the tools of their trade, not because they will need every tool for every task, but so the knowledge will be available to them when the need arises.
The poet (and any writer in any literary genre) who is serious about the craft should do no less.
Back tomorrow with “false poets.” Talk with you then.
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 1270
Mentorship Words…………….. 0
Total Nonfiction…………………. 1270
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX
Fiction for February………………………. XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for February.…………………. 21770
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 41360
2026 consumable words………………… 41360
2026 Novels to Date……………………… 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29