

Will somebody please disrupt Poetry already - mardack
http://ixjy.com/post/22704727159/will-somebody-please-disrupt-poetry-already

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cstross
Upvoted because the death of an art form is interesting to contemplate ...

I'd suggest that the problem with poetry is much more complex than this essay
recognizes. I'd also note that there is no scope for monetizing it any more
because the commercial poetry market imploded between 1918 and 1940; these
days it's virtually impossible to sell poems, and about the only people making
money from the field are doing so indirectly, via academic research/teaching
posts. It _should_ be possible for poets to use the same self-publishing
channels as everyone else who's banging on about the "ebook revolution" ... so
why aren't they?

You can disrupt a living, breathing field. It is somewhat harder to disrupt a
body that's been dead for so long that the corpse is fully skeletonized.

~~~
jonhendry
And Poetry Magazine is running on a $200 million bequest from an heir to the
Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company fortune.

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frobozz
OP appears to be under the illusion that the only living poet that anyone has
heard of is "Maya" (whoever that may be)

I'm not particularly interested in poetry, but even I could name three living
poets immediately without thinking, and a few more with a bit of thought.

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cafard
Bad prose is not the way to make me trust your judgment in poetry.

'Why don’t most poems make sense?

Poems don’t make sense because poets have no incentive to make them make sense
in order to get them read. Does that make sense? The fault lies not only with
the poets, but also with the system through which supposedly “good” new poems
and poets are identified and published.'

For what value of "most"? My reading time is finite, and there is only so much
poetry that I read, but there are poets actively writing whose poetry is quite
as clear as prose.

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antipax
I'd argue it's already been disrupted by rap.

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mardack
Indeed, that is the worrisome likelihood :(

