It's a generalisation, I know, but based on the evidence of a poem read out on Radio National breakfast this morning (apparently, this is a regular thing after 8.30am on Fridays now?) all reading of poetry on any form of broadcasting needs to be banned forever.
If people like it, they can do it in semi clandestine fashion in the back rooms of some pub or other. God knows it would take a lot of alcohol to make me enjoy it.
Update: given my daughter has complained about doing poetry in English, and I have expressed my condolences as she apparently inherited my dislike of the art form, I am curious - what percent of the population does actually say they like (some) poetry? I know as an art form it has some following, but how large is it? I mean, honestly, if there was a Cultural Revolution style government that could ban its creation, publication and recitation, would there be like 90% of the population (95% amongst high school students) who would shrug their shoulders and say "seems a bit harsh, but affects me not one little bit, actually"?
I know there is a risk that if I go on about this it seems like I'm painting myself as an insensitive and intolerant bogan*, but the poem I heard this morning has sent me over the edge.
* also, as it happens, I know that 3 of my tiny pool of regular readers are, at the very least, poetry defenders and 2 write it!
10 comments:
Many poems suck
but not all are terrible.
I like Les Murray.
Geoff
This opinion will upset reader Tim - but maybe it is the reading out loud of poetry that I find particularly cringey in, I don't know, 99% of cases.
I want people to treat it like pornography - something you participate in furtive privacy so it doesn't disturb the rest of us. (By "us" I mean "me".)
Hahaha, I reckon you're just trolling, you troll from the trolling trolls of trolldom! What was the poem, by the way?
Poetry reading can be in certain circumstances bad - people read the words in an affected and yet reverential manner, in a way which somehow conspires to kill any residual hint of meaning in an art form that has had meaning already mangled to near death by modernism.
PS here's a poem for ya. I got trolled by my own baby doing this one.
Ah, I suppose this was the poem. Slam style.
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/friday-poem:-mohammad-awad-with-ode-to-the-carers/12465502
Les Murray was a great football analyst.
nothing better than the lovesong of J alfred Prurock
I would further venture the opinion that a good part of the reason for the non-appeal here is the way the poetry is given to the audience, essentially foist upon them by the ABC as if it was something good for them, like medicine in the morning. We generally encounter poetry in all the wrong places in the west - as something that other people think we ought to read (or hear), not as near spontaneous utterances or jokes or songs, which is where poetry originates from and where it still derives its great strength from.
Worse yet - though people many times do feel the want for poetry, the expectations upon the art form - this feeling that it should be something good for you or good for society, and the largely thoughtless genuflection to the dead god of modernism - means that when people *do* attempt poetry, or seek for it elsewhere, they usually end up with poorly written stuff. Greeting card material, that's about it.
I recommend The Eve Of Saint Agnes, Gunga Din once a decade and especially The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. But I sympathise with Steve a bit on this one. Not because I don't think there is great value in poetry. But simply because of my own limitations in being able to appreciate it. And there may be something in modern life that marginalises poetry appreciation thats hard to put ones finger on.
Its not like with much of modern painted art which truly is a gyp. I kind of get a buzz from some of the italicised prose in Cormac McCarthy novels. That must be akin to what better readers may get from poetry. To me the ridiculously violent "Blood Meridian" almost seems like one big poem. A bit like the Ancient Mariner stretched to novel length and transmuted to a Western.
"Philomena" who used to post at Catallaxy quite a bit, and had to put up with all manner of abuse, sent me snatches of 11th century Chinese poetry. Could have been some 9th century stuff in there as well. That seemed very interesting to my ear. But I think it was just the buzz of realising that early Chinese life could be akin to life in the New World a millennium later. It had a time capsule feel about it.
So could this mean that the ability to appreciate poetry might be somewhat tied up with our living arrangements? Could it be that its hard to write good poetry or enjoy good poetry if you are locked in this entropic, modernist shit-hole we find ourselves in? The Chinese guy was talking about chopping wood to build a fire for some friend going to take the long walk to his place in the dark. The friend was to visit later and it felt like it was under kind of remote and depopulated conditions. There could be a psychic connection here that doesn't translate well to the suburbs.
Does poetry work well in the suburbs? At the end of Blood Meridian there is a suburban bulldozing scene and it feels like all the magic is gone. It feels like you'd rather go back to the earlier violence rather than live in this spiritually deprived modern world. Its a bit of a letdown at the end of the novel.
No - those are interesting speculations Graeme but that’s the short answer.
There’s a long answer taking in all the reasons poetry is largely in disfavour - I don’t propose to do that now.
But it’s not really true that the modern urban environment is uncongenial to poetry. In enlightenment London, a place flourishing with pubs and coffee houses and, essentially, the birthplace of the modern newspaper and magazine industry, poetry flourished too. There was high minded verse (Pope’s ‘An essay on mankind’) and plenty of scurrilous, deliberately offensive stuff (‘Here lieth two lovers, by strange mishap/Though perfectly chaste, both died of the clap’ - Pope, ‘Epitaph on two lovers struck by lightning’). It was circulated in papers, read out to bars and cafes of Whigs or Tories to amuse or offend (an apt comparison has been made to the blogosphere of old, though twitter could work too).
The increasingly urban environment in England accommodated many a poetic movement, in fact: first romanticism, then the various Victorian movements (fin du siecle, medievalism, sentimentality).
Australia, too, had a reasonably flourishing verse tradition in the papers of the past - though he’s not our ‘best’ poet, C J Dennis certainly wrote verse for the generations of literate Australians who read newspapers full of verse and folk ballads and short stories.
So poetry fell out of favour not, I think, due to increasing urbanity. I think the answer lies rather in the many disruptions of the 20th c: two world wars and modernism, for starters.
Well thats urban. What we are talking about is suburban. Victorian London was before the suburbs.
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