Poetic decline

So I read multiple accounts of a study showing that while Americans are reading more fiction than we did a while back, we are reading less poetry. Each of the articles seemed somewhat perplexed by this finding and offered various reasons for possible decline in poetry readership.

Oddly, the articles seemed to attribute the rise in novel reading to Oprah. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I believe Oprah has been a big champion of Maya Angelou. Perhaps I am wrong about this, but if Oprah's Midas touch makes Americans want to read mediocre fiction she approves of, shouldn't it also make them want to read decent poems she likes?

Oprah aside, the various reasons for no love being lost on poetry were as follows:

1) We ruin poetry for people by teaching "classic" poems to high schoolers.
2) Poetry is inaccessible. (by which they mean too "hard" to read, not too hard to locate)
3) Most poetry is bad.

Point 3 seemed particularly valid to me. I think a majority of people believe they can write a poem, but a very very small minority believe they can write a novel. As such, lots of people write really really crappy poems, but far fewer people write entire novels that are terrible. Not to say there are not lots of terrible novels out there, but I bet a straw poll would show that way more Americans have written a poem at some point than written a novel. With the internet it seems even easier to publish really crappy poems. I think that was previously the realm of high school literary mags and chapbooks, but now anyone can post lousy material to a pretty broad audience. I've trolled at some poetry websites and found the general quality of submissions to be pretty terrible. This seems sort of like people looking at a Mondrian or a Pollock and thinking "hell, I could paint that" but not thinking the same thing about the Sistine Chapel.

Maybe that leads to a point about how we teach poetry. I'm not sure that teaching Shelley to high schoolers ruins poetry for them. I think Dickinson gets taught pretty universally to American teens and she's about as accessible as you can get. I guess I understand point 1 to be that we start kids on poems that are too "hard." Which sort of dovetails with point 2, no? I think this is a straw man. We don't start kids on sonnets, we start them on Seuss and Silverstein. Earliest exposure to poetry is to very accessible and age appropriate material. I don't really see how graduating to Keats in high school would be more alienating that graduating from Clifford in grade school to Fitzgerald in high school. Apparently this doesn't ruin novels for people, at least per the results of the study, so it seems a thin argument to make for ruining poetry.

Also, I think maybe inaccessibility is an issue, though physically, not intellectually. Ever tried to pick up some poetry at the airport to read on the plane? I haven't really found Simic next to Grisham on the shelf. We market novels in more of an eye candy and impulse buy kind of way. You have to go looking for poetry. Say what you will about Amazon and online book shopping, they strip away the serendipity of the brick and mortar book store. If I go into a shop I can go to the poetry section and browse and read a poem here or there and find a volume that seems worth my time. You can't really do the same online. I think poetry sales relied on serendipitous purchases far more than novels did and have been hurt by the web stores far more.

I think all of this is a bit sad since it likely means even less decent work will get published. That's a shame. I thought the inauguration would have been a nice way to get some positive press for poets, but I think Elizabeth Alexander was a pretty lame choice and she produced a dreadful poem for the occasion. Honestly, I think it is a good thing that this NEA study rated so much ink today. That's more press than poetry usually gets in the mainstream media in a year all in one day.