Sunday, September 19, 2010

What is the state of American Poetry?

Anis Shivani of the Huffington Post asks, What is the state of American Poetry?

"Is it savagely alive, reaching its tentacles into new corners of consciousness, or is it a moribund corpse, having long been administered last rites?"

He asks a bunch of poets this, including
Clayton Eshleman ("...Today the writing scene resembles a blizzard on an archipelago of sites...")
Annie Finch ("American poetry is at a dead-end. And that's a good thing!" ... "Poetic fashions change surprisingly fast, so don't spend too much energy on them.")
Ron Silliman ("Fifty years ago, there were well under 1,000 poets writing & publishing in English. Today, there are easily over 20,000. A dead-end? Hardly.")
Danielle Pafunda ("American poetry is a live wire. In fact, it is a tangle of live wires....")
...and also a pile of other people in the comments section ("I don't think poetry is dying, it's just that there are too many bad poets out there.")

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sucks.
Sucks bad, real bad.

Anonymous said...

There's poetry in America?

Anonymous said...

Here's a question - when Georgey Boy Bush proposed a poetry gathering at the White House, Poets were up in outraged arms. Poems were written, words were said.
Our current Prez, the faux "liberal" - who has continued such golden oldies as war in Afg & Iraq & lord knows where, who has continued rendition, defends torture in court, has sheltered criminal behavior - how many poets have visited his White House? How many American Poets have sung his praises?

Geoffrey A. Landis said...

I'm not at all sure that the White House is the bellwether of the state of poetry in America, but a quick google search tells me that the answer to your question is, quite a few. See here, or here, or here, or even here.

Anonymous said...

Morally bankrupt?

Cited...

The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~Jean Cocteau