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Poetry has lost its meaning
Our daily newspapers are full of poetry. On average 16 articles a week appear in our nations papers with the word poetry somewhere in the article.
Wow I hear you say --- but don’t get excited too soon!
Only two of these articles ever have anything to do with actual poetry. The other 14 are about sport, music, business in fact almost every subject you can think of, except poetry.
Being an enthusiastic poet and wanting to source as much information as possible about what is happening in the world of Australian poetry, I signed up to all the major on-line Australian newspapers to get their articles on poetry. I used the news story email alert function that most offer. Try finding these articles in an actual newspaper!
It was mainly with the Fairfax and News Limited websites. Interestingly enough the Google alerts I signed up to using the word poetry yielded almost only poetry. About 15 articles a day from around the globe, mainly North American though.
From the Australian email alerts I received many articles, but few about poetry. It was almost a direct opposite to Google. 10% of the articles from the Australian alerts were on actual poetry, while it was 90% with Google.
Sports stories were the majority of articles I received from the Australian alerts. Why? Because of that much-abused phrase of ‘poetry in motion’ Most of these articles describing the sublime efforts of our nations sporting people. The other most popular hits were articles with the phrase ‘poetic justice’ these were crime and political stories.
It seems almost a prerequisite for sports journalists, that when searching for a word to describe something as effortless or unique they always fall back on the word poetry. You’d think that with the suggested ever-declining readership of poetry that over the years the word poetry would also fall out of use. It appears that it is our newspapers, which are keeping the word poetry alive.
The idea of what poetry is still seems to be alive, but by far in the majority the word poetry is seen and heard mainly in a sporting vernacular, not in the artistic. At least in Australia.
How did it happen that the word poetry got to be about everything but poetry? Poets are big on metaphors, describing what things are like, I guess this is what journalists and commentators are doing, when using the word poetry as a description for something good, something sublime or graceful.
We all know since the birth of the Internet there has been a ground-swell in poetry. With all the writing, communities, magazines, lists and general discussions about poetry, sometimes you’d think that that was all that happened on the Internet. So why have publishers dropped poetry off their lists? Don’t they see all this action on the Internet? If people aren’t buying poetry books what’s all this poetry happening on the Internet? Why isn’t there a correlation between the increase in the production of poetry books and the amount of interest there is on the Internet? Is the book dieing? Well there is a correlation but it’s in reverse to what you’d think should be happening.
I have to confess that out of the 18 books I purchased in the last year, only three were poetry, so maybe I have answered my own question. Thinking about it most were bought over the Internet also.
I guess that maybe poetry has found its level for our time. Not long ago Harold Stewart said "ours is an anti–poetic age" This appears to be even more salient today.
If Radio National were to drop PoeticA, that would leave no national poetry program on Australian radio. If the few poetry publishers were to drop or stop what they do, this would remove any new poetry books from bookshop shelves. If the Poets Union were to have its funding withdrawn that would leave only the Internet to help find poetry events and other selected information and activities on Australian poetry.
How do we wrestle back the ownership of the word poetry to its rightful domain?
I’d suggest that us poets (pretty good writers that we are) start submitting articles on the state of poetry in Australia to our nations papers. Write reviews on a poetry performance, a book, an event and get it into your local paper.
There’s a great community of poets out there writing, doing incredible stuff and no one knows about it. If we want more people to know what’s happening with Australian poetry, it’s up to us to help get it out there. Perhaps even start our own poetry newspaper!
Robert Kennedy
