Not infrequently when you plant a perennial precisely where you want it, it does not thrive. But it returns anyway, the next year, somewhere else. And blooms like a lunatic. The flower or the flowering bush knows where the good soil is and finds it. Poetry, we could say, produces a lot of green these days and very little bloom. Yes, more poets than ever are published, and more Ph.D.s are granted to study it than ever before. But no one reads but other poets and would-be poets and students who are forced by their eager or jaded or militant professors. Major publishers hardly publish any. Poets don't legislate from the shadows. How many people on the street would you have to ask to name five living poets before you could find anyone who could name one? And when you found that person would you recognize the name or have to look it up to confirm it?
We could say that poetry no longer thrives.
Or we could say that despite our best horticultural efforts to keep poetry in its shaded plot, poetry is doing very well over there, behind our backs--or in our faces, disguised. But not really disguised. It's not trying to hide. We are trying not to see it.
We still have too much of the Enlightenment in the rigid structure of our brains. Remember this is the era that determined there must be only one proper way to spell a word. Everything has its proper definition and everything fits within its natural borders. If evolution has taught us anything, it is that we err when we take the measure of reality with the ruler of our individual lifespan. To a being of greater scope, a frog is a dinosaur, and a furry little scurrying paleolithic critter is as much a human being as an acorn is an oak tree.
Enlightenment rigidity is a harmful and false way of thinking. And this is particularly so in regard to human phenomena--the stuff we, with our creative energies, think into being. A hydrogen atom is what it is. Granite too may be. Some things we don't get to understand outside of what they are. But poetry is not one of them. It exists, sure. The word in its most meaningful uses reaches out into something we did not create out of nothing. But it exists only for us, humans because it responds to something unique to us, even if it is (we hope) universal to our species. But to define it as the sum total of poems--of texts with some range of form and some access to aural figures and some set of line tropes--is to miss what matters most in poetry. Poetry is an experience created through language. And it doesn't matter where or how that experience is created. If poetry in the electronic and virtual world no longer thrives in the poem, it still thrives. (And I don't advocate giving up on the writing and reading of poems. And it wouldn't matter if I did. They will persist because they have adapted to the shade in which they grow.) Poetry thrives in song, certainly. It was always what mattered in song anyway. True, most songs are forgettable, either just bad or having their moment of sterile bloom. So are most poems. But Dylan deserved his Nobel Prize. Or if you think otherwise, that doesn't matter. There are songsters who do. And poetry shows up in novels and in film and on TV. And it's not just text. It exists in speech as well and sometimes requires it. It shows up in podcasts, and now and then on the news. Wordsworth was right that there is no essential difference between good poetry and good prose. Poetry exists wherever language creates experience through careful, deliberate, thoughtful, artistic rendering. It's not the experience of wanting to throw a brick at Donald Trump. At least I hope it's not. It is the experience of listening to Garrison Keillor tell a story.
