
Poetry Is Everywhere - tintinnabula
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/when-poetry-isnt-poetry/567571/?single_page=true
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Mediterraneo10
Poetry isn’t dead, but the range of contemporary poetry popular among both
ordinary people and critics is, I feel, contracting. This trend actually
predates the internet and goes back at least to the rise of the Poetry Slam
movement, which rewarded highly declamatory, socially engaged poetry but had
little room for hermetic or longform verse.

In our time poetry might “flourish” on Instagram, but is the social media
format capable of giving us a long poem like Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror” or A. R. Ammon’s _Hibernaculum_? It seems to me that one would
at least have to split things up into multiple posts, but then there is much
less likelihood that readers will follow the entire thing, or at the very
least simply be aware of how long it is. Is the social media form of virality
capable of spreading such introverted work as Paul Celan’s late period
starting from _Atemwende_ to the point that it could even register culturally?

Such poetry has never been terribly popular, of course, but in the past it
could at least receive steady support from academia. Nowadays, academia is a
less sure friend of that poetry, because being socially engaged ( _overtly_
socially engaged) is often considered a requirement.

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crooked-v
You seem to have forgotten about the existence of rap music.

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sleazy_b
I don't think of rap as poetry. I love both, and to me the claim that rap is a
form of poetry seems more like an unnecessary attempt to coopt the legitimacy
of poetry than anything.

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nathell
I read and occasionally translate poetry.

I find that, as a programmer, reading poetry strikes some of the same chords
within me as reasoning about code: expressiveness, attention to detail,
finding the perfect way to convey complex ideas.

As Norwid puts the latter:

    
    
      Beyond, above all your charms,
      You! poetry, and you, speech! Behold,
      Ever the highest will be – this aim:
      *To name each matter by its rightful – word!*
    

(Translated by Danuta Borchardt)

