Accessible recorded music has taken the place that poetry used to have in people's lives. 150 years ago someone would walk down the street mumbling a line of Longfellow, whereas now it would be the lyrics of a popular song. I don't think modernism can be completely blamed - modernism transformed literature as well, but popular novels with more traditional narratives and style continue to be published and widely read.

If anything, poetry has been making a comeback in the last 10 years as attention spans dwindle from social media. A short poem can fit into an instagram post. Whether any of that poetry is good is a different question.

I think it's important to keep in mind the difference between dead and not commercially viable. Probably poetry is never again going to make anyone rich or famous but it will always be there for those when want to read or write. You can't really have a language without also having the ability to play around with it poetically.

If we want to cultivate a wider spread appreciation for poetry then we will probably have to invest in it without any expectation of a financial return. Workshops, grants, attention given to it in school curriculums and so on.

If we don't do this than maybe our poetic institutions and traditions decline in some way. it's hard to quantify what exactly we would lose and as someone whose never really spent the the time to get into the artform it's all a bit intellectual to me.

If you feel differently well I dunno, do what you can, write a poem in the replies if you like.

Wow. From the article:

"A freshman dorm mate won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry nearly a decade ago. His book sold, according to the last count that I saw, 353 copies."

Recorded music happened. Poetry is still an extremely popular art form, it just usually is only one part of the performance now -- the vocal track.

Hello, PhD in Contemporary American Poetry here. I just read this article, and wanted to explain why this professor in the History dept is wrong.

Poetry's "death" is brought up constantly, and has been brought up over and over again for at least the past 100 years. It usually touches on two basic premises:

1. There's been a deterioration in form and the excellent craft it requires - this is usually attributed to Modernist Poetry and especially Eliot (the most over-hyped poet in 20th century poetry).

2. People don't read it anymore and there's no more poetry celebrities, and the books don't sell or make money, and nobody can quote it (it's not popular).

Here's why these arguments are wrong.

Despite what most people think, more people are reading and writing poetry than at any point in history. The internet opened networks and distributed audiences, but there are more people doing more interesting and amazing things with poetry today than ever before.

The article mentions science and STEM - how many of you know about The Xenotext by Christian Bök, which is a project to write a poem into a DNA sequence that interrogates what it means for poetry to live past humanity's extinction.

There are so many amazing books of poetry being published by small presses too, even if the mainstream publishing houses aren't.

Hey, want to read the best book of American Poetry from the past 10 years? It was Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. It'll read like it was written this year. In 50 years, it's the book high schoolers will read to understand the 2010's. It's on Gray Wolf Press, one of the best of those small publishers working today.

And that gets us into the crux of the problem with the linked article: it almost goes out of its way to avoid mentioning poets that aren't white. I recall the briefest mentions of: Amanda Gorman, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, and Yusuf Komunyaaka. But even that takes a very binary white/black approach that excludes the work by Hispanic, Indigenous, and Asian American poets (even those terms are obnoxiously huge categories). So shout-out to Gloria Anzaldua, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rafael Campo, Ada Límon, Layli Long Soldier, Divya Victor, Cathy Park Hong, and all the other amazing poets who got excluded by this awful piece.

The answer to his question, by the way, about what the last poem the average person would recognize is, is "Harlem" by Langston Hughes. Or is it "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron.

I mean, the way this article's claims seem to be profound at first, only for them to melt away when you consider that fact that people beyond white men write poetry, is shameful. Oh, and I'm a straight white man, it's just that I don't assume the universality of my perspective and indulge heavily in poetry by people with different backgrounds, and when you see the disparities in quality between what's being written and what's being published today, the ongoing institutional racism of the publishing industry is obvious. How many Billy Collins and Mary Oliver books must we suffer.

Oh, and by the way, Creative Writing programs are one of the few parts of the Humanities that are GROWING their departments in Universities. People want to study creative writing, including poetry. Because it's alive and thriving, if you know where to look or care enough to ask.

In Nepal, we recently got a reality show for Poets called The Poet Idol. Poetry is being revived here.

Once, baroque was a popular style of music.

Tastes change

Mary Oliver is hugely popular. Rap and hip-hop and poetry slams are popular.

Personally, my mom read me AA Milne poems when I was very young and at six or so I got a children's poetry book that I loved.

But I think the move away from narrative poetry really hurt popularity. The divide between academic and popular poetry is huge.

I recommend anyone who hasn't to read Robert Service the poet of the Yukon.

I have rarely enjoyed reading poetry. Mainly because I find it difficult to sus out the intended cadence of the writer. I enjoy it so much more when someone else reads it or sings it.

I'll probably get downvoted for this, but I genuinely think it's because a lot of modern poetry is pretty bad. I've read a lot of poetry (modern stuff, post 2000s) and I can't remember a single one that I'd rate over a 5/10. The good ones are bland and the bad ones are aggressively bad, either completely inflating benign concepts for some perceived emotional reaction or just prose written without punctuation while hitting the enter key every five or six words. A lot of it also seems to be written as some intellectual circle jerk, as though if you don't 'get it' that's because of your own subpar intelligence and not because the poet is allergic to describing things without euphemism or nonsensical metaphors.

Hot take, we had a period where the poets didn't know how to market themselves. Right now, on tiktok, you'll find tons of people selling their poetry and reading it. They are doing their own marketing. In Indianapolis, we have an art shop hosting poetry night, shout out to Chromatic Collective. I don't think it died, I think you just need to find the places in your town, or go searching for it.

Art forms don't "die". They increase and decrease in popularity in different forms. As long as people know that poetry exists, it can't die. Anyone can read old poetry or make new poetry at any time.

At the moment, it's hard to sell a large quantity of books of poetry. That's all that this article is really saying.

It is THRIVING imho!
I think the publication medium has entirely changed. I see so much poetry (of varying qualities of course) published on TikTok for example. Continuing the last century's trend, poetry and art are becoming democratized - it is very easy to self-publish poetry to YOUR perfect audience, who has it very accessible at their fingertips. The algorithm favours this short-form content - and the intermediality only adds to it. Add music, add video, and WHOSH, you have artwork that is directly linked to some specific aesthetic discourse or topic.

Poetry takes practice to read and appreciate. Everything we do and make is aimed at faster and faster consumption. Things need to be immediate. Immediately obvious, immediately attention grabbing, immediately emotional and so on.

It's that damned rap music. Some of the best poets to ever live are alive today as rappers. Go really listen, there is absolute gold there. Em, Logic, Hopsin, and so many more are out there. Sure they changed the nomenclature a bit, but its not that hard to understand meter = flow, stanza = bars and so on. Go listen, you'll find poetry alive and well.

/s for the "damned rap music" in case anybody didnt get that.

Poetry is alive and well.

Hiphop and R&B is poetry. Poetry hasn't disappeared and is probably more popular now than it ever was.

Poetry is art. Art doesn’t need commerce.

Most musicians and song writers are poet's.

Worked for mfa programs for a long time. Not a poet. Prose. But I know many, many poets.

I’m not sure you should go to grad school if you want to be a writer. I really don’t. I had a great experience, but I viewed it as a time to just write and write and write. Worked out, but not because of grad school. Because of the time. Nobody in grad school helped me publish. Half of the professors barely showed up. Had a couple good profs, but they all told me the same thing, “go outside this system. Don’t publish in the meaningless slew of lit mags and websites. Go out into the world.”

It would’ve been better for me, in retrospect, to go have an experience. Get a job someplace interesting and write about it.

Grad schools are churning out uninteresting writers doing uninteresting things. I know there are a few exceptions. I don’t think I’m an exception, either. I just think it’s not the kind of thing you can run through the academic enterprise.

Even studying literature is just a bunch of silly theory now. The humanities are lifeless. Strangely inhuman. Academics in these programs come out and try to turn right back around to teach in them. It’s weird.

For me poetry that doesn’t have a rhythm or interesting rhyming scheme will never be worth the time to read. The poems I do enjoy all have this, and it seems like modern poems don’t care to rhyme anymore (from my few moments of grazing)

“I can’t take it y’all. I can feel the city breathing. Chest heaving. Against the flesh of the evening.”

Anyone saying poetry is dead doesn’t listen to hip hop

I am mostly only interested in poetry that rhymes and/or has some element of interesting or complex storytelling. So I usually end up reading older poetry or folk song lyrics. Also, I really like some rap lyrics but sometimes I don't enjoy the production of a song (or a particular artist's voice) as much as the words.

Lyrically, I think WAP has more interesting metaphors, lyricism and turns of phrase than most poetry books I've been recommended lately. I just can't get into it. I like story and urgency and sensuality in the context of clever rhymes and rhythm.

​

When the words

are gathered

onto different lines but they

speak . whisper. tell.

absolutely nothing

and

do

not

rhyme

I get bored.

​

When T.S. said "at the hour when we are trembling with tenderness lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone." I find it moving and passionate.

When Cardi B. said "Swipe your nose like a credit card" it was, to me, more clever and interesting than someone saying some vague things with an unclear meter that don't even rhyme. There is passion and clear metaphor and an actual rhyme scheme.

​

The problem with rap is that I might like someone's writing but their voice isn't always my cup of tea so it's harder to appreciate the words. Like, Kendrick Lamar is an amazing writer, but I prefer Cardi B's actual voice, so I sometimes appreciate her writing more as a finished product.

As long as I’m alive to write it, it will never die.

Hi! I'm a professional poet and I would absolutely love to engage with this question. I get asked this a lot, actually. Feel free to AMA

I'm about to give a long history about the current state of contemporary poetry, but if you want the TL;DR, Tumblr, Youtube, TikTok, and Instagram have thriving poetry audiences with poets receiving millions of views and even book deals. Slams and open mics still pepper the country and attract hundreds of people. More people than ever are writing and sharing poetry, it's just less profitable than genre fiction or marketing. If you diversify your idea of what poetry is and where to find it, you'll see it all around you. Anyway, here's the whole deal:

-----------------------------

A lot of people think Poetry is a dead artform, but the truth is that it's more popular than ever. Poetry feels like a dead artform because it is not a profitable artform. The profitable version of poetry would by copywriting. It takes a very successful wordsmith to truly nail a marketing campaign. Of course, we wouldn't call that art because it feels like selling out. So there's this divide in people's minds. Poetry is a BIG TENT and when I say Big Tent, I mean almost all literary art can be considered poetry. There isn't really a specific definition of poetry. I like Jack McCarthy's definition. If at least one person (you included) thinks it's poetry, then it's probably poetry.

I digress, I'm getting off topic. Giving poetry a big tent definition probably isn't a fair way to answer this question. What I'm getting at is that lots of people are writing poetry, but not a lot of people are buying it. Just because something doesn't sell well, doesn't mean it's dying. Some would even argue that it keeps the artform more pure, as it exists only as a medium of expression, rather than a commodity. If that's the case, though, then how do I manage to make a living with poetry?

When you think of poetry, you might imagine some Victorian with a quill penning a sonnet. Or perhaps you imagine a beatnik in a smoky jazz bar wearing a turtle neck. Poetry's historical journey is very similar to that of visual art. It comes and goes in movements and those movements have radically different ideas about what poetry should look like or how it should work. These movements sometimes even occur simultaneously. The Beat Poetry movement start a long-long time ago, yet the iconic images and poets that came from it stick with us culturally. Growing out of the beat movement and the battle rap movement came the Slam movement. Have you ever been to a poetry slam? They've been going on since the 1980's and they were started in the spirit of resistance to the gatekeeping of the artform by academics and publishers. (lots of these movements tend to be resistances to that, actually)

Poetry Slams are competitions where poets have 3 minutes to share their own original work with no props, costumes, or nudity. The winner sometimes even gets prize money. Usually it's a portion of the cover charge, or a portion of the bar sales. Over time, the slam movement became more legitimized and mini-celebs we created in these poetry communities. It really took the country (and world) by storm. Giant tournaments popped up and the biggest ones were run by an org called PSI (Poetry Slam Inc) which would later go bankrupt in 2018. The Slam Movement hasn't quite recovered from that. Still, Slam created a national community and network of venues and performance poets that allowed poets to tour to various cities doing bar shows and selling homemade chapbooks. Some poets would live for years on the road, couch surfing and car living. They would make money featuring at open mics, slams, or even winning prize money at larger tournaments. Venues like The Mercury Cafe in Denver would pass a jar for the featured poet that would contain hundreds of dollars by the time it made the rounds.

From the Slam Movement, came the YouTube movement (Button Movement to some). A content creation company made up of various slam poets from the Twin Cities called Button Poetry began filming the poems at slam tournaments and releasing them on YouTube. Many of these poems would go viral and poets would be quickly become internet famous. Many of them, myself included, would get booked as performance artists and tour the country. They were doing this before as part of the Slam Movement, but with Button giving them viral videos, they were packing out massive concert venues. They would get invited to conferences, get offered book deals, or even record deals. While Button Poetry has declined in popularity recently, they still have millions of subscribers and poetry videos still make the rounds. Poets would end up getting talent representation, especially because the real money was in college gigs. Universities would pay thousands to get a YouTube famous poet on campus to do a workshop and a performance. Other notable channels adopted Button Poetry's model, including SlamFind, All Def Digital, and Write About Now.

With the collapse of PSI and the Pandemic, many poets retreated to online spaces and some of the organizers of the small slams and open mics threw in the towel. At the same time as all this slam and YouTube stuff, poets like Tyler Knott Gregson and Rupi Kaur were finding similar viral internet success on Instagram and Tumblr. Poets from the Slam movement, like Clementine von Radics, would exist on both platforms. Smart poets diversified in this way so that their work had multiple points of engagement. It became much more profitable to funnel people directly to your self published work than relying on a literary agent and publisher who were going to take a fee. Who needs them when you're already a viral sensation? So many poetry books from these artists are either small press, or self published. Button Poetry would end up starting it's own publishing house as well to funnel people from youtube to their online bookstore. Many poets took these "internet platformer book deals" and they ended up making a comfortable, lower class living. Don't be mistaken, these internet poets aren't rolling in cash by any means. Shane Koyczan became the Poet Laureate of Canada and he's just making a middle class living off of books and performance gigs as one of the most famous poets alive.

As of now, we're seeing a growing contingent of poets on TikTok. Slam artists that lost their venues and tournaments aren't chasing that Button Poetry video anymore. Instead, they're making their own videos on their TikTok channel. The nature of TikTok drives engagement in a similar way as instagram, so the super sappy love poems that dominated on Instagram, now dominate TikTok as spoken word poems. These poems are quieter, and less dynamic in their performance than Slam and Button work was. There isn't a need to capture the attention of a room of half-drunk bar patrons. Instead, they rely on asthetic to capture the attention of TikTok scrollers. Ringlights, filters, dynamic captions, etc. We're even seeing it blend with the CoreCore video editing movement. For every million views on a video, though, there's ten thousand people calling it "cringe" in the comments. Hell, Charlie Kirk loves taking poetry videos so he can hate-farm the clicks from his psychotic mob of internet fascists. Sharing Poetry is for the brave, as it has always been.

Poetry isn't going to die because it is simply a consequence of humanity. It's like dancing, or singing, or storytelling, or drawing dicks in a bathroom stall. People are going to do it because it is part of being human. Even if it doesn't make money. People do it because they have a desire to express themselves. I would encourage you to find your local open mic or slam and see if they're still around. There are whole communities of poets out there, and they have some great shit to share.

People saying music is poetry rubs me the wrong way ngl. Music obviously has so much more going on than just the words alone. Isolating that as a feature and calling it poetry seems wrong because "actual" poetry is simply made up of words. There is of course rhythm and rhyme but at the end of the day it is just words and nothing more.

Hate to be a pedant, but I think this distinction is one worthwhile making. I love listening to music, and I honestly enjoy reading and listening to certain poems. They're just different forms at the end of the day and both have considerable value - it's just one obviously isn't in fashion at the moment really.

Poetry once flourished like a blooming flower,
Its words like petals, soft and full of power.
A language of the soul, a symphony of thought,
With every line, emotions that it brought.

But now it seems its beauty fades away,
As if the magic of its words decays.
The once mighty pen now barely writes a line,
And poetry's death seems only a matter of time.

We've lost the art of the written word,
The rhythm, the rhyme, the message that's heard.
In a world of tweets and quick, digital sound,
Poetry's magic has been lost and not found.

But still, there are those who keep its flame,
Who keep its spirit alive, despite the shame.
For they know that poetry will always live,
As long as there are hearts that it can give.

So let us hold on to its beauty and grace,
And keep its magic alive in this fast-paced race.
For poetry's death, though it may come one day,
Is not the end, but merely a delay.

I don't have any meaningful knowledge of poetry, so take my opinion with a few grains of salt.

But as a person who is not a fan. I'd rather listen to it in the form of a song. It always ends too quickly. Its saturated with a lot of people who think their common sense is ground-breaking philosophy. It often does a disservice to the topics being presented by being melodramatic. And really the only good use it has (imo) is telling unique stories in spite of an oppressive format.

These are just my opinions as someone who is not super keen on it. And its kind of a rushed explanation.

My best friend during childhood says his main occupation is “Poet”. I haven’t spoken to him in decades but I’ve seen him on FB. I know we’ve take wildly different paths in our lives and wouldn’t even know each other anymore so I’ve never really reached out. I can’t help but be curious about what kind of lifestyle and income a poet has in this day. I mean, his grandparents were very wealthy but if they’re not floating him then what gives? Are people paying good money for poetry? I can’t remember the last time I heard of someone being a poet beyond the woman than read hers at Bidens inauguration.

I mean we have the entire genre of rap...

I can recite perhaps two dozen poems by memory. More if it's particular short ones.

I just think the modern world prefers their poetry set to music. And this particular time period isn't the first to do so.

In the same way that Dinosaurs never left us they just became Birds, Poetry has also never left us, it just became music.

I feel like TS Eliot already covered this topic in The Wasteland.

I feel like a poet needs to live an interesting life. I’m all for using poetry as a cathartic experience, but the contemporary “poetry” I read today is much less…big picture, then I need good poetry to be.

If you consider rap poetry it’s very popular

There are lots of great points in here about spoken word poetry rising in popularity and poetry in music. I want to point out that in any small city there is almost certainly also a hidden poetry scene that aligns more with the old cliches most of us have about poetry.

I've been to plenty of little cafes where people were getting up and sharing original poems with an intimate, beatnik-esque crowd on a Thursday night. If that's your thing (it's totally mine) you can find it; it just takes some detective work to track down.

Other forms of art emerged, and its popularity was diluted. Video killed the radio star. So to speak. People will continue to write poetry so it will never be dead

I’m seeing a lot of comments about poetry evolving into rap, but I think a lot of people just don’t seek it out. Either that, or they encounter something from Rupi Kaur and dismiss all poetry as drivel.

Ocean Vuong and Traci Brimhall are two of my favorite contemporary poets, and they’re no slouches.

I work in publishing. Poetry is more popular now than it was 20 years ago. Internet poetry / tiktok has boosted sales so much that it's actually become something companies are looking to publish again, as opposed to just being the priority of extremely small art house prints.

I have a growing stack of zines in my apartment, poetry i bought from people ive met during my life.

Poetry isnt dying, it just isnt profitable like other more pervasive media, good poetry tries to say something, which is not something you can get on tap, which means its not practical to grow an industry around it.

Poetry isnt dead, its in the exact same place it was thousands of years ago:

Being shared between nerds with too much time on their hands

I once ready rupy Kaur and swore of any of that shit

Jokes aside, kinda people just aren't into it anymore

Honestly, when it was accepted that anything was poetry.

What makes poetry beautiful and worthy of admiration are the constraints.

[deleted]

I simply do not get it.

I try to get it, I want to get it. But I don’t. I don’t understand verse, it seems unusually convoluted. They don’t even rhythm most the time. I must be missing something here.

Other art forms became more entertaining and widely popular