Commentary
Among the serious people who actually run the world, poetry does not rank high on their roster of concerns.
That is a pity.
In a world that is (as T. S. Eliot said in the first of his "Four Quartets") “distracted from distraction by distraction,” poetry can offer new acuities and welcoming restorative silences.
That might seem like small beer in a fraught world teetering on catastrophes real and imagined.
But it is worth remembering the central place that poetry once occupied in the patrimony of human culture.
I was going to say that the question of whether poetry continues to occupy an important position in the metabolism of culture is an open question.
But in fact, we all know that the question has been answered, and the answer is No.
To be sure, every teacher, and probably most parents, “approve” of poetry (if not necessarily of poets).
Poetry is one of those certified “good things” of which one is naturally in favor.
But approval does not entail acquaintance, let alone mastery.
Nor does it entail the vitality of the thing approved.
An interesting history might be written of those human activities that, from the point of view of established taste, have made the journey from urgent requirement through commendable accomplishment to respectable curiosity.
It pains me to acknowledge that for most of us, poetry occupies a place in that melancholy narrative.
I hasten to add, however, that the same might be said for much traditional cultural endeavor.
We live at a moment when many of the institutions traditionally entrusted to safeguard and transmit that power have passed on to other, more demotic entertainments.
One marker of that passage is velocity.
Woody Allen once quipped that he took a speed reading course and was able to get through “War and Peace” in 10 minutes. “It’s about Russia,” he deadpanned.
One of poetry’s great gifts is to offer us lessons in slow reading.
By resisting the intelligence “almost successfully,” as Wallace Stevens put it, poetry trips us up, slows us down, makes us pause to consider, to deliberate, to savor.
The resistance is as important as the ultimate success.
Sometimes, indeed, it is the success.
The cognitive friction that poetry involves is especially valuable at a time when speed is king.
The risible idea of reading “War and Peace” in 10 minutes underscores the philistinism of confusing reading with the acquisition of information.
In “New Grub Street” (1891), George Gissing satirizes the journalistic mores of his time.
Toward the end of the novel, a few characters are discussing a new publication designed to appeal to “the quarter educated; ... the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention.”
Its working title is "Chat," but that is too weighty.
In order to succeed, it needs to be rebaptized.
“Chat doesn't attract anyone, but Chit-Chat would sell like hot cakes.”
The contents would be true to the title: “No article in the paper is to measure more than two inches in length, and every inch must be broken into at least two paragraphs.”
It may be worth noting that poetry, like all human activities, is susceptible to perversion.
There are contemporary “schools” or movements of poetry that endeavor to exploit, rather than resist, the aimless detritus of our digital cacophony, glorying in new variations of the aleatory.
But there is also “music” indistinguishable from tribal grunting.
Back in 2011, The New York Times, that reliable chameleon on the motley of the moment, breathlessly reported that “there’s evidence that the literary flowering of Twitter may actually be taking place. The Twitter haiku movement—‘twaiku’ to its initiates—is well under way.”
I don’t doubt it.