Poetry is Not Dead, We Just Sing it Now

I did a strange thing the other day. I picked up a book of poetry and read it.
Something about the rain must have made me feel nostalgic.

Back in 2003, Bruce Wexler wrote a Newsweek article proclaiming that poetry was dead. Except for a few unknown poets counter arguing amongst themselves, most of us read it and shrugged in resigned agreement, “Yeah, he’s right.” If we read it at all. http://www.newsweek.com/id/59182

So it must have been the rain or maybe that T. S. Eliot crossword puzzle clue I encountered a couple of weeks before that caused me to pick up his book of Selected Poems. Plus, I had a cold and time to kill. Alongside the penciled notes in the margins from my college days, I recalled some of my favorite lines: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”

On the back cover the publisher proclaimed Eliot’s far-reaching influence, beginning with his “first and instantly famous work, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Yes, that was the crossword puzzle clue I couldn’t recall: who measured his life by coffee spoons? But wait, instantly famous in 1917? Has poetry been dead that long? What was the last famous poem I could think of? Could I imagine a poem becoming instantly famous in 2008?

The answer to the latter is, of course, no. Poems and poets no longer become broadly famous. Reading poetry is not a regular activity of my generation. It is dead for us for all the reasons the Wexler outlined in his article five years ago: “People don't possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren't willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly.” Simply put, our world is too fast and too noisy for poetry’s slow, quiet, and repetitive requirements.

Poetry, however, is not dead. We just sing it now.

What happened between Eliot’s time and today is not the death of poetry but an evolution in the way poetry is consumed by a massive audience. Somewhere between Eliot and Allen Ginsberg, as radio and television popularized passive entertainment and opened up an ever expanding field of options, we left behind the actual reading of poetry. It was too solitary; it took too long. They were so many other more compelling entertainment options that were direct, social and new.

Ginsberg wrote his famous poem “Howl” in 1955, incidentally, the last “famous” poem I could think of. He read it first for an audience at The Six Gallery in San Francisco: “Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection/to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” It was published shortly after by City Lights Press, but the momentum of the poem’s success had much to do with Ginsberg’s live readings. He transformed standard recitation into performance art, and a large audience listened. He brought style and movement into the mix, and his generation responded. His audience wanted to feel a part of something. Solitarily reading a poem in their room was not it. The first recording of Howl was made in 1956. By 1969 he had recorded many more poems, some like William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, set to music.

At the same time, Bob Dylan was marking the definitive coming-of-age of the poet-musician. His first album was released in 1962, and in less than a decade poetry went from being read to being spoken to being sung. The poet-musician was reborn: “Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind/Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves/The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach/Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.”

On the heels of Dylan came a host of poets who spread their odes through song. Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Tom Waits all come to mind because they have been around long enough to begin amassing credit for their writing. But our own generation is replete with poet-musicians. I hear poetry up and down the conscious radio outlets. Neko Case's 2002 album "Blacklisted" is bursting: "The red bells beckon you to ride/A handprint on the driver's side/It looks a lot like engine oil and tastes like being poor and small/And Popsicles in the summer." I hardly know where to begin in the oeuvre of Jeff Tweedy, but the opening line from the song “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart is a good bet: "I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue/I'm hiding out in the big city blinking/What was I thinking when I let go of you?" And there are so many others. The knowns: Billy Bragg, Ryan Adams, Conor Oberst, and the soon-to be knowns: Sera Cahoone, Bon Iver, and thousands of others. Really, I mean thousands.

Poetry is very much alive in our generation. Few of us may be able to recite a poem from memory, but ask us for the words to our favorite songs and we can shower you with out-of-tune lyrics.

In these new troubadours we find visual satisfaction too, adoring as we are of style and fashion. They remind us, what is life without style? The way they dress inspires us. The way they move arouses us. At live shows we find community, though few would dare to term it so, sounding so suburban and settled down.

This is the rebirth of poetry for our generation. In songs we do have the patience to listen to the words of a poem twenty times and gradually gain a deeper understanding of the meaning. We can “let the words wash over us like a wave” while we drive in our car, ride the bus, walk down the street, make love, make dinner. When we listen to a song over and over again, the song remains the same, just like poetry, but the meaning and the feeling changes with each successive audition. The words may take us back to old times or give new meaning to today.

Critics may argue that all of this – sound, style, movement – is a distraction from the substance of poetry. The words can’t stand alone on the page, they would say. In the scholarly realm, save for a notable few, that may be the case. But it’s not the purpose of the design that concerns me. It’s the end result. What is true poetry anyway? Isn’t it simply beautiful, insightful, or elemental words that illuminate our regular lives with understanding?

We look to our poets like we always have – to show us beauty, truth, or new way of being, but today we want them to do it in more ways than the poets of old. We want to hear it, see it, feel it, belong to it, and maybe read it too. We can dream of knowing them, being with them, being one of them. More of our needy modern senses are set up to react by them: sound, sight, imagination, inclusion. But underneath there is still poetry.

So we’re not just lazy and distracted, as Wexler’s article suggests. Our reverence for poetry remains. We instinctively recognize its value. We have only rediscovered and recreated a form that works for our rapid times. After all, lyric poetry dates back to the ancient Greeks. Sappho and her contemporaries accompanied their spoken poems with the music played on a lyre, hence “lyric” poetry. Our modern poet-musicians are returning to poetry's ancient roots, and we as an audience, happily gather round.

So how does a poem become instantly famous in 2008? It is sung to us. Songs are poetry for the new generation.