dumbfoundry

Ticket: Your new live CD, "Conviction," is very accessible.

Mali: That's the difference between spoken word and poetry. Those who write for the page know that the biggest thing they have on their side is that if the reader doesn't get it, he or she can go back to read it over and over again.

But if you're writing for an audience--which is spoken word's main difference from poetry--then your poetry has to be immediately accessible, because if the audience doesn't get it, they can't go back and check it. So it's okay to put in allusions to Dante's Inferno, but the success of your poem can't hinge upon the audience's knowledge of "The Divine Comedy." [...]

T.S. Elliot screwed that up. He turned poetry into something you had to go to school in order to learn how to understand it. He was one of the first New Critics, who if nothing else, validated "close readings"of a poem. They basically believed it was perfectly legitimate to talk about what a poem means, and show evidence for it, even if it wasn't what the poet intended. So lot of people went to graduate school to write and understand poetry, and academic poetry exploded and flooded the market with all kinds of poets who are utterly and completely opaque and abstruse. Subsequently, poetry did experience a decline in popularity.

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Thursday, April 08, 2004 at 10:35 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.