Poetry Today -- Some Thoughts

Recently I posted about medieval Chinese poetry, and I attempted to produce a poem of my own in one particular mode. However successful that endeavor was, it did start me to think about the state of poetry today.  In former times, poetry was read, recited, memorized, and exchanged.  It formed communal bonds, and it shaped society's worldviews and mores.  What is the state of poetry today?

A good friend of mind related to me a few years back an episode that occurred when he was traveling overseas for business.  A group of internationally diverse men were gathered together for an evening of socializing and entertainment after their conference.  Some were familiar friends; others were strangers to one another.  As I recall it, the electricity failed.  Regular forms of entertaining distractions were absent.  The men spent the time reciting poetry that they had memorized. The poetry was not all in the same language.  But their time was enriched by the images and sounds and culture and imagination that they shared with each other.  Poetry bound them together.  Each man had previously internalized some poetry, and from the deep wells of their being they drew the poetry to share with each other across their differences.

Maybe these men were exceptional.  They were academic types, but not as you might think.  They were not comparative literature professors.  They were not expert philologists. They were mathematicians.  Perhaps the fact that mathematicians could spend hours enjoying an evening reciting for each other memorized poetry makes that evening all the more exceptional.

Even so, where do all of us, professional academics or not, experience poetry today?  If poetry does not serve as the explicit identity-shaping cultural glue that it once did, where does one find its traces today?

One way sometimes suggested is that we today experience poetry in songs. That raises in my mind a question: "Are all very good song lyrics good poems?"

No, I say. Music and the voice may add pathos to words that the words would not have by themselves.

For instance, I think that Pearl Jam's "Yellow Ledbetter" is an amazing song, but the lyrics by themselves are not good poetry.  Indeed, these lyrics can be humorously misheard.  And the fact that Eddie Vedder sometimes varies the lyrics in concert performances, or that there are only some fixed lyrics, does not tell in principle against them as poetry.  Many culturally transmitted epic poems and lyric poems might have stable cores around which individual variation is permitted.  Still, "Yellow Ledbetter" suggests that we might have very good songs that do not always amount to very good poetry. And we should not too quickly assert that today our song lyrics always reflect our poems.

Despite this distinction, it is true that a good poem can make a good song. To be more precise, good song lyrics may be good poems. Much church hymnody may be cited as examples of this. A popular hymn that most people know is "Amazing Grace": it has rich lyrics (words) that were set to an appropriate musical score. The same might be said for "It Is Well With My Soul." Both songs have emotionally moving back stories.  

Many songs, we must admit, have corny lyrics that work with their accompanying music just fine as songs.  Much country music falls into this category.  

But not all.  Alan Jackson's "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning" is substantive in its plain, everyday language lyrics, and it would make a decent stand-alone poem.  Set to music, though, it becomes even more full of pathos.  It recalls former attempts to honor the dead, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade," although their language is very different from each other.  What makes both verses successful and superior are their sounds, their repetition, their rhymes -- all of which help their reflections on seemingly senseless death to resonate richly with hearers.

How many living poets can you name?  How many dead poets have most people in the population actually read or heard?  Probably not many. Poetry in the United States at least is just less prominent than it was in former generations.   

What might be some reasons for that?  Maybe this is in part because poetry takes time to appreciate. Poetry demands re-readings or multiple hearings.  It requires reflection.  It necessitates savoring.  It is subtle.  It often leaves its subjects or moods unresolved.  Images give poetry their power.  Narrative arcs are less pronounced.   Poetry requires work that a novel or play or film -- all forms that are narratively driven -- does not.

Poetry, then, rewards patience, empathy, and imagination in a way that much contemporary culture might wish to possess but might not want to labor to achieve.  Increasingly, I find, my culture is one in which people desire executive summaries, synopses, or feeds not more than 140 characters.  Poems, when summarized, are subject to more violence than plots.

In fact, we violate the poem itself as a means of communication when we distill into a sentence or two "what it is about," as if it had a pithy message that would allow us to sidestep the poem and save time.  As Michael Oakeshott has said, I think rightly, "A poem is not a translation into words of a state of mind.  What the poet says and what he wants to say are not two things, the one succeeding and embodying the other, they are the same thing."  You do not appreciate a joke simply by skipping to the punch line.  Likewise, you do not appreciate and experience the beauty of a poem by synopsizing it.  The language by which it unfolds is inseparable from its experienced significance.

There are, no doubt, other reasons for the current state of poetry in the Anglophone West.  Ultimately, perhaps, poetry offers, requires, and generates a sort of experience that is little desired and perhaps less esteemed than other contemporary competitors.  Unless or until that changes, songs may remain the main source by which most of us will encounter (not so great) poems in our everyday life.