502. Is Poetry Dead?

BROWDERBOOKS

I am now publishing two of my nonfiction titles as ebooks, with the help of an aggregator named Draft2Digital.  More of this anon.  

Does the term aggregator puzzle you?  Here is my favorite definition.   Aggregator: one that aggregates.  Does that clear it up?  If not, stay tuned.

                      IS  POETRY  DEAD?

"Poetry is dead.   It's an obsolete art form, just as much as cave paintings or silent movies.   It must have died around the year 1960, because that was when the last good poems were published."

This spurt of wisdom came to me online from Quora, a purveyor of cultural and other information that flashes regularly on my computer screen, I don't quite know why.  The author is a German pontificator, Roland Bartetzko by name, whose photo shows a faintly smiling man of middle years, far beyond the stage of youthful exuberance and joyous but ill-informed folly.

Herr Bartetzko, you're full of you know what.  You are uninformed, smart but stupid, misguided, ill-advised, presumptuous, and shockingly ignorant of literary history.

He goes on to question whether poetry can even exist in the wake of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.  "There's only bad poetry left and only bad poets.  Too lazy to write more than few lines at once and unable to say anything substantial."  

Granted, he may be addressing the poetry scene in Germany, not here, but I suspect that he's totally misguided there as well.  

Fortunately, he observes, poetry isn't selling anymore.  Poets publish their "pathetic scribblings" in private and give them away as free handouts.  Poetry is now "a pastime of wannabe enlightened senior citizens.  If you have something to say, write prose."

So ends the spiel of this oracle, as translated and communicated online.  I never imagined myself a defender of poesy, but Herr Bartetzko's mouthings prompt me to assume this role.  I will confine myself to only a few trenchant remarks.

• The death of poetry -- like that of opera and diverse other art forms -- has been proclaimed before and always proven wrong. 
• Poetry has survived the collapse of the Roman Empire; the Black Death, which killed half of Europe; the French Revolution; the Industrial Revolution; the rise of the middle class; radio, television, and the Internet; 9/11; and the plague now in progress.  And it will survive Herr Bartetzko, too.
• Calamities don't kill poetry; they inspire it.

©  2021  Clifford Browder