"Does poetry matter?" Duh.

Well, this is distressing.  A recent blog post at the New York Times book blog, Paper Cuts, poses the question: does poetry even matter?  As evidence of poetry's diminishing importance: an article in Poetry about the need for more political poetry and a comment from David Foster Wallace about how American poetry will gain more readers when it addresses a more "common" readership (Really, DFW?  If you were alive, and most days I remember to wish you were, I'd email you about this.).

True.  People don't read poetry.  It doesn't sell.  DFW's "common man" gets frustrated and scared off by line breaks and unusual vocabulary.  Teenagers are horrified by Romeo & Juliet every year in freshman English classes across the country.

Yet the kind of question asked in Paper Cuts risks essentializing broader cultural values to the elitism of contemporary poetry on one hand and rampant American anti-intellectualism on the other.  To my mind, you can shelve poetry along with all of the other elements of American society that are deeply undervalued: the arts, education, independent businesses, access to public works and health services, good television...

The fact that someone can take a question like "Does poetry matter?" under serious consideration means that, as a culture, we're really just in the terrible habit of devaluing what it means to create something (which is ironic, considering that more people than ever consider themselves writers, even though our literacy rates are plummeting).  We value loudness and immediacy.  We value the material.  We value our way or the highway.  We value speak English this isn't Mexico.  We're not patient enough to listen, to make ourselves uncomfortable, to ask questions.

Poetry, and, to my mind, all good art--literary, visual, auditory, hybrid!--should make us confused and full of wonder and want to respond.  This requires listening, quiet, openness, an ability to do something productive with unease.  Which, I can understand, is a pretty difficult state of mind to achieve when The Hills are on in the background (okay, that was a pot shot).

Maybe what's really been happening (what's happened in the 20th century more generally) is that poetry is no longer a genre for mass reproduction or mass consumption.  I think this is one of many reasons poetry gets called elitist: it's for the few instead of the "democratic" many (what a great farce: capitalism as democracy).  We could really talk lots more about elitist literature and what that means, but I'm going to keep going.

Contemporary poetry is written for a smaller audience, a more particular audience, a more privileged audience.  I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with this.  The relative smallness or largeness of a writing community can become problematic when artists become too insular and stop seeking new ways to understand and to explore, but that's a different kind of problem.  An audience, more generally, has to be taught to value something (kind of through osmosis--I think of values as etherial, social, inherited), or has to feel the spark of recognition that fires when humans encounter something beautiful.

It makes sense to me, then, that given the state of things, the audience for most poetry is largely other poets or other writers.  And it's relevant because we can't help writing and responding to other writers, to other art, to the world around us.  Poetry is one of many available forms in which to express this response, but it's not going to pay the bills because it doesn't hold any value in the capitalist model of American letters.  But there are other models.  I'm thinking of all the small presses out there, letterpressing beautiful chapbooks and stitching them by hand, sometimes giving their objects away, mostly just trying to cover the costs of printing.  Then there's all the new litmags cropping up online with fancy web design and a devoted cadre of followers checking out their free content.

Maybe poetry will be relevant to a larger audience somewhere down the road.  Maybe it won't.  Most likely it won't.  But I don't think that means the form is no longer culturally relevant.  When American poets stop writing poems for one another, for whoever will read them, for themselves--that's when you can say something's different, something's passing on, over and done with.