The media's occasional panic that poetry is on its deathbed is happening again. And, again, poetry isn't dead.

Every handful of years the debate rages anew over poetry's worth and vital signs, and that time has seemingly arrived again. Recent weeks have seen a media upheaval questioning the value of literature's artsier cousin, from Heidi Simmons's column asking "Is poetry dead? Does anyone care?" to the New York Times holding a debate among seven writers over the question, "Does Poetry Matter?"

Online magazine The Millions has a systematic look at how fond of poetry the United States is, but notes Americans love poetry, just not poetry books. Indeed, sales of poetry books have stagnated in recent decades, leading publishers to pull back the reigns on publications, or look for new and and creative ways to reach audiences--audiences that seemingly don't exist, at least not in large numbers willing to part with their money.

Tom Brady agrees: NFL quarterbacks matter.

At the Times, it's a debate in name only--a debate where whichever of the seven writers praises poetry most wins. It's akin to asking seven NFL quarterbacks if NFL quarterbacks matter, or seven priests if religion matters.

To Heidi Simmons, poetry isn't dead, but it isn't the lively entity it should be, and sees it dying in our schools first and foremost.

But maybe one comment left on The Millions article sums up the issue for poetry today, an insight left by someone going by the moniker Germane Jackson:


"I’ll offer a simple answer to a complicated question, undoubtedly a reductive and insufficient answer, but one that hopefully will get at the point of this article.

[...] Americans like poetry, but mostly poetry not written within the last thirty or forty years, around the same point at which most poetry became an exercise in careerist academic obscurantism.

[...] I realize this comment sounds like populist demagoguery, and I don’t mean to denigrate the entire project of modern poetry [...] But I do think that poetry’s intellectual vanguard largely fails to coherently and meaningfully engage the average reader about their lives, and is more interested instead in a sort of dense opacity, a modernist aesthetic hangover from which poetry has never recovered."


Not that popular opinion equals quality, but a look at the current top-20 poems on PoemHunter.com (as voted by readers) suggests as much as Jackson states, a list including the likes of William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, William Blake, Pablo Neruda, and Emily Dickinson--none, it should be noted, who reached their individual artistic peak in the last 40+ years. Angelou comes closest, but even scholars consider her "late period" to be post-1969.

Ella never dies.

Headlines are meant to grab attention, which explains how silly Simmons or the Times are being. Poetry is no more dead than jazz music, no more a corpse than ballet. But like all artistic realms over an extended period of time, a popular consensus develops. Humans, largely, just like what they like, and for poetry that preference seemingly exists prior to the work of 1970. Just as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and John Coltrane are what makes jazz jazz, so too does Dickinson and Frost and Hughes and Shakespeare make poetry poetry, no matter what new, exciting, and creative aspects modern poetry might bring.

It sounds like an over-simplification to answer "What's wrong with poetry today?" as such, I know. Deeply philosophical waxing might sound more emotionally powerful, systematic examinations of the publishing industry might appear more profound, but it doesn't seem to change the basic pattern. Americans don't buy books of poetry today because they largely don't like the poetry of today. Yes, there's an audience for modern poetry, but it's a sliver of the broader populace. I might like modern poetry, you might like modern poetry, but looking beyond our own literary myopia might suggest most Americans don't agree.

Changes in popular taste didn't kill jazz, and it won't kill poetry. Being a niche market is still a market. And you know what? That doesn't mean you're dead. It means you're okay.