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If you think iambic pentameter is the beginning and end of poetry in English before free verse conquered all either your Master’s was narrowly focused or your d

If you think iambic pentameter is the beginning and end of poetry in English before free verse conquered all either your Master’s was narrowly focused or your defense of modern poetry could be improved. As to Maya Angelou, she does seem to be writing poetry and some of it is ok so that places her head and shoulders above any of the writers you mentioned in your first post on the new GCSEs. Obviously she’s far more famous for her novels, but then again they’re unambiguously good. If someone thinks the governing body of British schools has no taste then their respect will not especially impress. If it is possible to read poetry aloud and even consider that the author didn’t care how it sounded it’s not much good as poetry. Ginsberg and Heaney were household names. People who weren’t forced to know who they were at least knew of them. Instead of Ed Sheeran think of Sally Rooney, if that makes the point clearer. If you read the Irish Times or listen to Irish radio or watch Irish TV you know Sally Rooney exists. She’s important in the cultural conversation. None of the poets you mentioned have a tenth of her cachet. Poetry as a popular art is dead because modern poetry is so unappealing. Being irrelevant to the cultural conversation is how modern poetry is unimportant. Most people who love and care about and read literature don’t read modern poetry because it’s authors have no interest in popular appeal. They want to appeal to the kind of people who award teaching positions at Queen’s because they certainly aren’t going to make a living writing poetry. I used to think this was inevitable, that poetry was doomed because of TV, radio, recorded music, but Arabic and Chinese have important, popular poets. Normal people know and care about poetry. So it’s not that poetry in English was doomed to irrelevance, it just disappeared up its own arse. Important, meaning of wide cultural relevance and impact. In the US, Ginsberg was the last poet an ordinary person might have been expected to know existed, the last household name. As a gesture of good will if you want email me the names of 30 modern poems you think are excellent and I’ll do a close analysis of five of them, like I’d get my students to do. I will give far more than cursory attention to all of them. BarryPCotter icloud

groovy2shoes 4y ago
Some time ago I was at Barnes & Noble with my sister, and I had a look at the poetry section. I was dismayed that, after all these years, the modernist poets still have a stranglehold on the Muses, with their sad, clammy, modernist hands. As if e.e. cummings were a poet merely because his typewriter lacked a shift key, or T.S. Eliot merely because he mistook the carriage return for punctuation. A wasteland indeed! Surely thine eternal soul shall forever suffer hellfire for thy r.h. Sin. Poetry, poetry… “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” half the time if it’s not got random line breaks or indentation then people don’t consider it poetry but if it does then that is enough and as for the other half—or so very nearly half, like a pie whose pieces have all been eaten but whose dish yet contains stale morsels broken off by the very act of dividing the pie, remnants too small to be considered worthy of taking by any prospective eater now dried by the chill Winter atmosphere and the pale rays of a Spring Sun not yet arrived—any prose bearing any recognizable characteristic of poetry whatsoever, any prose perceived to be elevated on high—how high exactly I cannot say, perhaps as high as the throne of a king or the perch of a songbird or the very heavens hereon—and clothed in raiment of purplish hue—how purple I cannot say, perhaps as purple as the robe of a king or the fletch of a songbird or the very heavens at dawn—but it is this high and purply prose that this half deems poetry. It reeks of, I realize, elitistry and snobbistry, but it is, in reality, good ol’-fashioned honestry. We get such pretension, ostentation shoved down our thirsty throats, dawn to dusk by marketing and adverts, and PR’s brazen boasts, that oft I find it stifling, the stench of stagnant shit and piss; and so to whiff a fresher air, I call it what it is. Every god and reader knows there’s nothing wrong with prose, yet a sentence broken in the midst is poetic only from a distance; and have it ne’er a music, metre, rhyme: your “poem” isn’t worth my time. — “Greaves of Ass”

groovy2shoes 4y ago

Some time ago I was at Barnes & Noble with my sister, and I had a look at the poetry section. I was dismayed that, after all these years, the modernist poets still have a stranglehold on the Muses, with their sad, clammy, modernist hands. As if e.e. cummings were a poet merely because his typewriter lacked a shift key, or T.S. Eliot merely because he mistook the carriage return for punctuation. A wasteland indeed! Surely thine eternal soul shall forever suffer hellfire for thy r.h. Sin. Poetry, poetry… “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” half the time if it’s not got random line breaks or indentation then people don’t consider it poetry but if it does then that is enough and as for the other half—or so very nearly half, like a pie whose pieces have all been eaten but whose dish yet contains stale morsels broken off by the very act of dividing the pie, remnants too small to be considered worthy of taking by any prospective eater now dried by the chill Winter atmosphere and the pale rays of a Spring Sun not yet arrived—any prose bearing any recognizable characteristic of poetry whatsoever, any prose perceived to be elevated on high—how high exactly I cannot say, perhaps as high as the throne of a king or the perch of a songbird or the very heavens hereon—and clothed in raiment of purplish hue—how purple I cannot say, perhaps as purple as the robe of a king or the fletch of a songbird or the very heavens at dawn—but it is this high and purply prose that this half deems poetry. It reeks of, I realize, elitistry and snobbistry, but it is, in reality, good ol’-fashioned honestry. We get such pretension, ostentation shoved down our thirsty throats, dawn to dusk by marketing and adverts, and PR’s brazen boasts, that oft I find it stifling, the stench of stagnant shit and piss; and so to whiff a fresher air, I call it what it is. Every god and reader knows there’s nothing wrong with prose, yet a sentence broken in the midst is poetic only from a distance; and have it ne’er a music, metre, rhyme: your “poem” isn’t worth my time. — “Greaves of Ass”