Time was, not so long ago, that poetry was a dirty word. Poetry was the domain of teenage goths who penned endless screes of bad lyrics about blood and graveyards and bloodletting and how the goddess in their form class ignored them and so on, or otherwise it was fodder for the fay indie kids who idolised Morrissey. Poetry wasn’t cool. In fact, poetry was downright embarrassing.
The last few years have seen a seismic shift. Poetry is cool again. Poetry is the literary medium of choice. It’s so versatile: people have discovered that they can express their innermost feelings without having to resort to the ‘dear diary’ journal routine, or rage against the machinations of government and modern culture, or simply fill the time at work recording their boredom by he vehicle of poetry. Perhaps more notably, a poem is, generally, a lot less time-consuming to read than a novel, or even a short story.
This may well explain why poetry blogs are proving remarkably popular at the moment.
Far be it for me to suggest that people comment on blogs as a way of pallying-up with the author or to feel as though they are part of a commentary on a popular blog, but… well, that’s precisely what I am suggesting. There’s nothing like being in with the in crowd, and the virtual world is every bit as cliquey as the real world. In fact, it’s perhaps even more so. If you’re a nobody in the real world you can always rely on your virtual mates… apart from when they ostracise you, drop you as a friend or flame your forum postings and comments… it can get seriously ugly in the virtual world. People really don’t hold back. It’s easier to go for the jugular and lay into someone on every imaginable level when you don’t actually have to face them – ever, and perhaps don’t even know what hey look like or what their real name is.
None of this explains the immense popularity of so much truly terrible poetry, though. The superabundance of poetry appearing on blogs now means there’s almost infinite choice. I’ve checked out many, many blogs, and there are some very good poets out there. Strangely, they’re not the ones receiving 300 comments and even more kudos on every post. The most popular, top-ranking poetry blogs – particularly on MySpace – are truly abysmal.
I don’t mean this in an elitist, snobbish sense. Or maybe I do. Nevertheless, the point stands: the works are technically terrible, ungrammatical, atrociously spelled (endless confusion between there, their and they’re, for example) and the ideas expressed lack depth, insight or maturity of thought. In short, much of the popular on-line poetry explosion presents itself as the half-baked and immature, ill-conceived notebook scribblings of the juvenile and the semi-literate rendered in a digital format.
Some of the authors are young, and can perhaps be excused. Many, however are old enough to know better.
So what does this tell us, if anything? First, it perhaps suggests that this is evidence of the dumbing-down of society as a whole. Even our literature has become a matter of lowest-common-denominator, popularity-contest based self-indulgence speaking for the masses, society-wide straw-poll reflections of the state of our ‘culture’ encapsulated within the microcosm of the most popular poetry blogs. It may simply be evidence of a literary lethargy that’s become embedded within our culture, whereby readers are satisfied with shallow, token representations of emotional responses to situations and cursory commentaries on the issues of the moment. If this is so, it would hardly be surprising: after all, popular culture – be it TV, film, music or books – is all about immediacy and simplicity. Complexity is out, surface is depth, and so on.
Whatever. Attention spans are diminishing no-one reads blogs over 300 words in length so the chances are the majority of reader either navigated elsewhere on seeing the length of this article or otherwise turned off just over halfway through. For those who have made it this far, congratulations. In some small way, by reading a longer piece of prose, you’re acting as part of the counter-revolution against the rising tide of terrible poetry.
And if you’re loving my work, there’s more of the same (only different) at Christophernosnibor.co.uk
