A modern poet claims that he is going to reject modern technocracy by going off-line. This anti-modern, romantic impulse is not surprising at all coming from a poet. Poetry is actually a great example of a mode of communication that has been almost entirely superceded by a more advanced mode: lyrical music.
Really, the greatest poets of the 20th Century were Lennon/McCartney, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Bono, David Bowie, Kurt Kobain, etc.
The action, the innovation, popular interest, and technical achievement, was in poetry set to music. We saw spectacular cultural movements, developing at lightspeed at times, responding to society, interacting with society, government, economics, war, fashion… in short, doing everything that art is supposed to to.
Meanwhile, there were other people outside of this movement who wrote poetry without music, and their musical counterparts created music without words, in the style of Beethoven and Mahler. These people performed an important function in that they kept ancient crafts alive, if on life support. They had a sense of history and tradition that was lost on interlopers. However, as valuable as their work was, they were living in cultural eddies, stuck in little whirlpools going around and around while the current of life passed them by.
It is suprising in some ways that such people are still around. But when we see that there are people who still practice calligraphy and armour-making, we should not be so surprised.
{ 4 } Comments
Can’t agree with you on this one.
For one thing, music has been around for just as long as poetry, and the two arts have had an extremely long history together! The one art has not ’superseded’ the other in any meaningful sense. Indeed, in many ways the music of the 20th century that you appear to be thinking about – mass-produced pop music from the jazz age onwards – is significantly less sophisticated than the classical and popular art forms that preceded them (symphonic/instrumental/operatic). For it to be ’superseding’ old art forms it has to move on in a significant and substantial way.
And lyrically there’s no real sense in which music has ’superseded’ those poetic forms that have come before either. Not unless you ignore all the technical innovations coming from just about every poet since Shakespeare, and the long history of the poetic forms, the development of different rhymes and metres, the cross fertilisation of separate poetic traditions (French, Italian, German, English, Chinese, Japanese, etc…)
Poetry is perhaps less popular than it has been. There are probably a lot of complex reasons for this: maybe the rise in private entertainment, such as television and radio and DVD drew public attention away from poetry as well as plays; maybe the dissemination of poetry in books has tended to water down its effects; maybe the revolutions forced through by modernist and postmodernist poets have helped make current poetry seem effete, sterile, aloof, elite, academic; maybe it is a symptom of the failure of education.
But the art is still very much alive. Right about now, in Fitzroy, just down the road from me, there’ll be a bunch of poets competing to a huge audience for a cash prize. I know this because I passed up the opportunity to go there so I could do other things tonight… one of which is writing this blog comment.
Well, life would be boring if we all agreed with each other all the time.
Look, to tell the truth, I love good poetry, and there were some spectacular 20th century poets. Ted Hughes was a genius.
Plus, I’ve created very mediocre poetry of my own from time to time.
However I worry about an art form that has staged a retreat into campus libraries and isn’t part of the hustle-bustle of society and culture.
If there are contests and prizes going on in your neighbourhood, that’s great and healthy.
My intuition though is that this is not indicative of the general trend, which is that poetry is increasingly at the margins.
IIRC ancient Greek poetry was set to music by default. There’s not a lot of poets running around loose in Homer without their lyres.
Music can elevate relatively pedestrian words, and vice-versa. You can take words that are moronic on paper, drape them artfully over three chords that go pretty much nowhere, give ‘em to Diana Ross or somebody with the right arrangement, and it becomes immortal.
I’d agree that there is no living English poetry on paper. If there were, you could pay the rent with it outside academia.
A lot of people regard poetry as dying or in trouble. I don’t.
It’s the late-20th century way – to regard the arts as obsolescent, self-defeating, obscure, dying. A lot of artists do this as part defence mechanism, part a means for getting money – ‘help me, I’m like an endangered cultural species!’ Actually it probably explains a lot about the typically leftist culture in the arts – because it’s a mentality that the left find very appealing and understandable.
Me, I just write poetry – and essays – and blogs – and stories – and just about everything else. I’m not sure whether it’s a compulsion, or what, but the urge has come to seem so much a part of what I am that I can’t regard the art as obsolete.
An even better reason for not regarding poetry as dying: people listen to what is, effectively, poetry all the time and don’t feel embarassed or important. Song lyrics are of course one example of this. But then you also get people who go to stand up comedy shows where the comic specialises in comic stories, or comic songs, or comic poems.
How these events are different from, say, a performance of a Shakespeare comedy is merely a matter for semantics.
Interestingly, blogs are a good medium for poetry, and that’s why you often see commenters indulging in limericks or haiku to make jokes or further their arguments…