Viva Poetry, Via Pollitt

Hilarious headline alert: "Poetry: Not Dead Yet, Argues Katha Pollitt."

Indeed.

While I feel myself beyond the pseudo "death" epiphanies that the media likes to trot out every now and again (i.e. is-poetry-dead, is-feminism-dead, do-MFA-programs-cause-fiction-to-die, etc.), Pollitt's piece shouldn't be dismissed for a headline she didn't write. In fact, Pollitt brings a different voice to the poetry conversation. She's an essayist, a poet, and a columnist at The Nation; Pollitt's most recent book of poems is The Mind-Body Problem. With feet in different worlds--I suspect her audience in one genre isn't familiar with her work in other genres--Pollitt's vantage is interesting.

Consider:

The paradox of poetry is that so many more people write it than read it. In this, it’s a little different than the other arts: people who play instruments listen to music all the time. Would-be painters spend lots of time in museums and galleries. I’m not sure why this disconnect exists: perhaps it’s a chicken and egg thing, where the less attention is paid to poetry — in magazines, reviews, even bookstores — the less people are aware of what’s going on in the art, which causes the media to neglect poetry even more, because who wants to read about this obscure thing nobody seems to care about? Or perhaps it’s due to the way poetry is taught in high school, as a kind of maddeningly complicated way of saying something simple, like seize the day, or my girlfriend says she loves me, so why won’t she sleep with me?

Pollitt believes the way to make the life of poetry more visible is quite simple: reading it. Buying it. Checking it out at the library. That is, mirroring our habit of indulging in a verse or two (if we are casual poets--my hand's up on that one) by indulging in the verse of others ... perhaps including five of Pollitt's favorite poetry collections.