State of Letters

Exercise Your InkTank Our Poet Heroes

In Why Poetry Matters (The Chronicle Review, June 27, 2008) Jay Parini argues that poetry doesn’t matter to most people. “They go about their business as usual, rarely consulting their Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Frost,” he says. “One has to wonder if poetry has any place in the 21st century, when music videos and satellite television offer daunting competition for poems, which demand a good deal of attention and considerable analytic skills, as well as some knowledge of the traditions of poetry.”

Parini goes on to argue that poetry only stopped mattering in the 20th century, when “something went amiss” and poetry became difficult. “That is, poets began to reflect the complexities of modern culture, its fierce disjunctions,” he says. Before that, poets such as Scott, Byron, and Longfellow, ruled the world. They were cultural heroes, as well as best sellers. And people loved their poetry because “it provided them with narratives that entertained and inspired. It gave them words to attach to their feelings.”

When even articles that argue for the value of literature (Parini’s title is Why Poetry Matters, after all) situate the art form in a rhetorical battle that it can never hope to win, what hope does it have of asserting itself as a valid, useful, or even practical endeavor. Of course television trumps poetry in the popularity contest. Television trumps everything. But if it’s true that poetry is largely regarded as “too difficult” to be worth the trouble for the ordinary reader, it seems something must have indeed gone amiss. What is it? Why don’t people connect to poetry in their everyday lives?

Let’s make the question a bigger one about literature in general: What place does literature have in your life? Is it about entertainment? Inspiration? Emotion? How connected is your experience of reading to your experience of writing?

You Better, You Better, You Better
I recall being immensely irritated by my first assignment in my first graduate program: I had to write about the state of contemporary literature. And then the second assignment pissed me off even more: I had to write a paper addressing the question, “Why do you write?” I think I believed myself above these concerns. I felt they should be self-evident—I read what I like and I write because I’m a writer—but it turned out that not even I knew what I liked or why I liked what I liked or why I was doing what I was doing, which was existentially weird and a little depressing.

If you hate me as much as I hated my professors for asking you to write about these things, I can’t say I blame you, but I’m going ahead with it anyway. Worse, I’m going to ask you to do it in storytelling form. Answer one of the two questions (“What is the state of contemporary literature?” or “Why do you write?”) in the form of a poem, essay, story, play, or some strange hybrid. Write your piece from the second person perspective, or (in other words) from the perspective of a “you.” Go team!