The reason poetry is losing prominence in our lives is due to the Information Age

can anyone recommend a book on how to appreciate poetry? i get that repetition empasizes a word, what now

hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674021105

>Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers.
>The four poets taken up in this volume—Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats—come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows us Pope performing as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay, Whitman writing as a poet of repetitive insistence for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking, Dickinson experimenting with plot to characterize life’s unfolding, and Yeats thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument.
>With customary lucidity and spirit, Vendler traces through these poets’ lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind, the condensed power of poetic thinking. Her work argues against the reduction of poetry to its (frequently well-worn) themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is always in admirable poetry a strenuous process of thinking, evident in an evolving style—however ancient the theme—that is powerful and original.

read it out loud
read it out loud

that's it. 90% of poetry's techniques are made clear by reading it out loud. The subtle sonic-effects are actually heard. The little pause for each enjambment is made, allowing the understanding of the enjambment. The rhythm announces itself. Read it out loud, please god. and poetry makes so much more sense.

This is a very limited view of what poetry is, and I think it lost prominence a few decades before the information age -- coinciding with the 'openness' of visual art in the 60s.

The reason poetry has lost its prominence is because contemporary poets suck.

Wait 5-10+ years. Something is coming

There were plenty of great poets working in that era

Read John Ashbery

People are afraid of anything past Eliot.

There is a huge canon of post Eliot poets

Hart Crane
Seamus Heaney
Robert Frost
e.e. Cummings
Wallace Stevens
W.H. Auden

To name a few major ones

>myriad of
Dropped

What do you know, oh traveler?

Poetry is the original and finest form of literature. The novel is a sloppy degradation and plebianisation of poetic style.

The backlash against this openness, where all honesty and outpouring is seen as pretentious and edgy, made poetry undesirable to write. People are too afraid of being cringey to spend time developing their style, so they just don't bother at all.

But my father and neighbours will think I'm a faggot or I've been radicalised, I'm sorry but one of the appealing factors of reading is how I can do it quietly.

No.

Poetry went to shit the moment "anything is a poem if you put enjambment in!" stopped being ridiculed.

This is a serious post everybody

>Poetry left our lives just as information became more easily accessible.

You're wrong, OP. Poetry started to lose space when the novel came in proeminence. Suddenly, there was no room for fiction in poetry, because novel as already in charge of it. And then, in the last century, came in the urban popular music.

Cinema, novel and popular music is what killed what you now conceive as poetry.

>Cinema, novel and popular music is what killed what you now conceive as poetry.
>what you now conceive as poetry

What do you conceive of as poetry? Aren't all of those mediums heavily influenced by poetry?

Well, if you take poets like Sappho, Anacreon and the troubadours you'll see that all their poems were sung just like in today's popular music. There was no concept of silent reading at the time. Unfortunately, today's poems aren't sung. And they dont tell stories like Divine Comedia or Odyssey. So what today's poems do? That's the problem, no one knows. They are heavily amorphous.

Not amorphous. The dissolution of symbols requires the reader to invest time into study of the necessary method of interpretation of the work of the artist.

Each poet is sensible through their own system.

>The dissolution of symbols requires the reader to invest time into study of the necessary method of interpretation of the work of the artist.
That has nothing to do with what I said m8.

>Each poet is sensible through their own system.
Well so is every filmmaker, painter, prose writer or anyone else if they decide to refuse mimesis.

That completely does. Poetry is in the same position as the extremity of post-modern art. There is no foundation for expression like in your examples of the Comedia or Odyssey.

Now you didn't said shit. Formulate your thoughts, mademoiselle.

What don't you understand?

Well, how is the whole medium not an amorphous thing if every poet is completly different? Imagine like if you have to spent a whole life to dismantle every novelist out there? Or every filmmaker?

That seems to be what we're heading towards.

That's why no one outside the whole poetry circus (universities included) reads contemporary poetry. And they read it only because they need a job.

>And they dont tell stories like Divine Comedia or Odyssey.
I think film has taken that role. There are elements of epic poetry that have been clearly appropriated into cinematic forms.
What about a more modern example - imagism - can't we see examples of that in the juxtaposition of images in montages?

Well thanks for repeating my words. Thats what I said in the beginning.

Ah right. I thought you meant those mediums superseded poetry, not that they were a form of poetry.

>Suddenly, there was no room for fiction in poetry

I feel that way too. I remember a quote from Hollander saying something like "the building blocks of poetry are elements of fiction".

>reading out loud
i-impossible
i can't do it, i refuse

For God's sake read A.R. Ammons' Garbage IMMEDIATELY.
/You/ can take it from there.