OT: What happened to poetry?

Whistle
1

When I was a young man, poetry was
big. We were excited about T. S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound, ee cummings, W. B. Yeats,
Walt Whitman, and so on. Indeed, poetry was
part of popular American life.
Well, it isn’t any more. With the
exception of the published poets
on this board, I can’t think of
a single contemporary poet of
importance. Of course there are
poets out there, but they’ve lost
their audience. How come?

Also, back then painting was
big. We were interested in and
excited about Picasso and Matisse.
I can’t think of a single contemporary
painter of importance. How come?

Also contemporary classical music
was of importance. We were fascinated
by Stravinsky and Prokofief. I can’t
think of a single contemporary
classical composer of importance,
with the marginal exception of Philip
Glass.

And I suppose the same thing goes
for novels, for plays…

What’s happened? Any ideas?

2

Television. I consider it to be the single greatest contributor to the downfall of meaningful American culture, the rise of junk culture and the general dumbing down of America. Marx said the religion was the opium of the masses. That was because he died before television became our national religion.

3

Considerable truth to that, obviously.
But I wonder if it’s the whole
story. If Hemingway,
Joyce, and Yeats were writing now,
if Picasso and Matisse were painting now,
wouldn’t we know?

4

The trouble is all these computers. Sure very basic literacy is on the rise, but other than that, what good is the Internet?

5

On 2002-10-13 01:14, jim stone wrote:
If Hemingway, Joyce, and Yeats were writing now, if Picasso and Matisse were painting now, wouldn’t we know?

I don’t know much about the art world, but as far as the publishing business, I don’t think those guys could get published today. Market research wouldn’t be able to find the audience for them. Too many publishers are looking only for brand name authors. Years ago, publishing was a gentlemanly business. Its primary purpose was to promote art. Donald Klopfer and Bennet Cerf were willing to be arrested and go to jail in order to bring Joyce’s Ulysses into the U.S. How many copies of Ulysses do you think they sold in the first year or two Random House was able to publish it? Relatively few compared to the stuff they’re pushing now. But Cerf and Klopfer didn’t care! They knew it was a great book and knew it would have a long life, probably eventually returning their investment.

Publishing today is a business like any other - bottom line profit motivated. If market research doesn’t show that a book will sell (and sell big), it doesn’t get published. So the shelves are full of Dean Koontz, John Grisham, Steven King and Danielle Steele. There are still great books being written, but they are published by the small houses with little in the budget for promotion.

It’s as easy to buy a John Grisham book as it is to get a McDonalds hamburger. Try finding titles put out by intellectually oriented publishers like 4 Walls 8 Windows in an airport or a drugstore. Even your local Borders will probably have to special order it for you.

There Walden, that’s what the internet is good for - you can find any book you want, including all the classics, and have it delivered to your mailbox!

All that being said, I still think the main problem is that television (and movies to a lesser extent) is sucking up all the talented people with the lure of big money and then stifling their creativity by allowing market research to dictate what they create.

No doubt the people we’ve been talking about would resist the temptation, but with everyone busy suckling at the electronic teat, there aren’t many people out at the art shows.

Whooo! I need more coffee after that post!


\

B flat or begone!

[ This Message was edited by: jim_mc on 2002-10-13 04:57 ]

6

Anyone else notice that Stone and Walden are both getting perilously close to the 1M post mark?

7

On 2002-10-13 04:51, jim_mc wrote:
There Walden, that’s what the internet is good for - you can find any book you want, including all the classics, and have it delivered to your mailbox!

Or download them for free from Project Gutenberg.

But we won’t do that too much…need to keep you in business down at the publishing house.

8

Walden: I don’t work in the publishing business. I work in the printing business. My company specializes in financial documents. The stuff we print was written by lawyers and accountants, not artists. Financial printing is a much more stable and lucrative business than book printing.

Many years ago I worked in publishing, as a print buyer. It was during the transition period from the gentlemanly pursuit to the corporate pursuit. Publishing became a less pleasant business to be in, and the one thing that didn’t change was the pitifully low salaries. I prefer the smell of ink before it dries anyway, so I came to work here.

9

On 2002-10-13 05:03, jim_mc wrote:

I work in the printing business. My company specializes in financial documents. The stuff we print was written by lawyers and accountants, not artists.

I know. You told us about it on chat, the other night. I just couldn’t resist saying it anyway. :slight_smile:

10

Hoo, boy, but have you wandered into a pet peeve of mine!!!

I listen to NPR a lot - and unavoidably get treated to what is now called poetry. Hah! I say again, HAH!!! It has no meter, no rhyme, and printed in paragragh form wouldn’t even be very interesting prose. Some time in this century, poet wannabes got lazy. Unlike Shakespeare, or Shelley, or Frost or others of a now dead age, they decided that there’s no need to make poetry special, just write down any rambling that comes to mind, type it in in lines or partial lines rather than sentences and paragraphs, and call it poetry.

I’ll now proceed to demonstrate with an original and completely extemporaeous poem:

I went for a walk in the woods
and saw an apple tree
but the wild apples were all bitter
so I sat on a hillside
and
mused on the nature of life

:applause:

What happened to poetry? Poets killed it!

11

I dunno about poetry, never having been a fan of that medium. I’m also at a loss, though, to come up with a currently active artist that catches my fancy. As for drama, there may not be a current version of Tennessee Williams, but there’s plenty of good stuff around. I don’t follow it myself, but I know plenty of people who head into DC or make the trek to NY several times a year to see new plays that they love.

As for composers, there are loads of very talented and creative people out there. Arvo Part, Rautaveera, Gorecki. I just heard an unbelievably good piano concerto written and performed by an American of Dominican birth named Michel Camilo. I saw a trio by an Israeli woman named Shulamit Ran a couple of years ago. Alan Hovhaness died only a year ago; he was kind of the modern version of Haydn, very prolific, if not particularly exciting. All of these people write really wonderful music.

You really don’t have to look hard to find good modern music, but you do usually have to look, either by listening to non-commercial radio (where I heard Camilo), or by looking at smaller record labels. They composers are kind of caught in a catch-22. The record labels don’t want to take a chance on something without proven commercial appeal, but you can’t prove commercial appeal without having your music on a major label. Another catch-22 is, most of Hovhaness’s work hasn’t been released because he tends to be kind of neo-classical, ie, not new enough, but most composers who really challenge the listener have a difficult time because of that, ie, too new. So the labels keep coming out with new versions of the three B’s rather then giving us something new and creative.

12

I was an English Lit major in college a million years ago and loved poetry; even wrote some drivle of my own. To this day I cherish and still read from time to time my favorite, Yeats.

Upon reading this thread, I thought perhaps, too much to do with security issues, terrorism, etc. but then all ages have had such worries. Perhaps it’s the spread of these concerns and concomitant issues and reactions through TV, press, internet that tends to inhibit any endeavors other than those associated with making money and feeling secure.

Then I thought I should ask my daughter; maybe we’re just too old and everything is really the same today. Well, she loves poetry too and studied it last year in JHS; she is not in her first year of HS. However, she also loves the “old guys” and doesn’t really know of any contemporary poets. Interesting, huh?

Regards,

Philo

13

I’m powerfully interested in
classical music, yet I’ve never
heard of any of the people mentioned
in Chas’s post. Of course there
are talented composers, playwrites, poets,
sculpters, and painters out there.
But I think Chuck really has put
his finger on something. There
is a problem in the arts
themselves. That doesn’t mean
it’s a fixable problem, or
that anyone is necessarily
to blame.

Baroque music
had a couple of hundred years
and then it was exhausted.
There was only so much
good music in it. Well, what
goes for a style of music
may go for an entire genre.
Classical music may have
exhausted itself–at the beginning
of the 20th century there
was no place new to go
except where the audience
couldn’t follow.

I think something like this
has happened to painting–
rather paradoxically the
impressionists, Cezanne,
abstract art, which were
so full of vitality, were
the deathknell of painting.
As soon as painting stopped
being representational, it
began to lose its audience,
and it became very hard to
tell the contemporary stuff
of 20 years ago from the
contemporary stuff of today.

I believe that greatness
rises through the commercial
stuff–marketing forces
have always existed in
one form or another.
Shakespeare was driven
by them. Part of what’s
going on now is the absence
of greatness. No G B Shaw,
No Ibsen. But that’s
partly because the traditional genres
are less capabable of
expressing it, I think.

Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love’s pleasure drives his
love away,
The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.

The herald’s cry, the soldier’s
tread
Exhausts his glory with his might.
Whatever flames upon the night,
Man’s own resinous heart has fed.

W. B. Yeats

Perhaps we are finding
new art forms… The loss
of poetry is what I miss
most.

[ This Message was edited by: jim stone on 2002-10-13 10:45 ]

14

Perceived lack of interesting contemporary action in the arts bugs me too. For now I have two comments.

First, I think that genius has always had a hard time of it. Bach wasn’t revered in his own lifetime, Hume acquired the literary fame he craved only late in life and was turned down for a chair on petty, anti-intellectual grounds. (Does anyone remember the name of the man who beat him to it and, if so, do they remember him for anything other than that fact?) I don’t think that Joyce received much credit in his lifetime. And Socrates days ended in trial and suicide. Perhaps there’s something universal here. Genius is fine in someone dead—that’s quite unthreatening. But the thought that the person in the next office might be a genius is something very hard to confront and live with on a day by day basis.

The other point was the effect on the humanities of the current fashion for postmodern theory in our universities which seems to me to be taken (probably mistakenly) as licensing contempt for the kind of discipline and reverence for tradition without which art can’t flourish. Constant iconoclasm is just boring. I think that the fashion has just about run its course but it will take many humanities departments decades to recover.

15

That last post was mightily appreciated.

Regards,

Philo

16

Wombat summed it up, when it was said above Joyce wouldn’t be published today, I thought that he had touble enough finding an American woman running a Paris bookshop mad enough to fork out for a first edition of Ulysses. How many painting did Van Gogh sell during his lifetime. None
Nothing new here so.
We are having a couple of weeks of nice weather here, which is brilliant and badly needed after the summer we didn’t have. We go out and do things and so I found myself in Coole park last week, wandering the Seven Woods but finding the Swans absent[the turlough was so low there was hardly any water left] and I pondered Yeats and all that crowd that used to gather there.

A few weeks ago I walked the steet and a man walked by, I could have sworn it was Seamus Heaney [this country is a small place, you run into all sorts of people all the time], now he looked pretty much like a serious enough poet. So I assume there must be a few around here and there.



[ This Message was edited by: Peter Laban on 2002-10-13 12:47 ]

17

The same reason Britney Spears is rich and famous but even good rock bands can’t get signed. If it can’t be easily watered down and fed to the masses, if it doesn’t rake in billions, it won’t get published.

Our society in general has become stupid and no longer has a culture. It’s just mcdonalds and madonna, all fluff. No wonder other countries laugh at Americans. (And just for the record, after I get out of college, I am moving to europe, hopefully permanently)

Jim hit the nail on the head, more or less.

Big business is what killed culture. Human greed is what forced the arts underground. People are too busy worshipping the almighty $$$ to care about culture and art.

18

Poetry mutated, look at RAP!

19

TelegramSam hit the nail on the head! As regards music, Irish music is pretty much all I listen to today, as long as it’s not frothy for the new agers.

20

Another thought - what will the ages think of some of the stuff that’s around now that we just haven’t heard of? Maybe there really are some Yeatses out there (hopefully)and we just don’t know it yet.

Philo