> is there anyone who seriously reads poetry for fun nowadays?
1. IMO, there is some really great poetry out there. But the ratio is terrible. It's honestly worse than Youtube comments.
2. Poetry 1.0 mostly died for... reasons. But it's replacement - Poetry 2.0 - people absolutely love. You'd know it better by its common name "rap".
If you want some encouragement to wade through sewage to discover gems, here's one that really speaks to me:
Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
------------------------------------
W. B. Yeats
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Among other things, it really captures some of the melancholy of being a parent who isn't particularly wealthy.
Back into my TECO going, with my pounding heart now slowing,
Soon again I heard a feeping, somewhat louder than before.
"Surely," said I, "surely this is some strange bug of RMS's
Which an interrupt professes, though I have no other job;
Let me then ask DDT if it thinks there's another job --
'Tis a bug, and nothing more!"
Reclaimer, spare that tree!
Take not a single bit!
It used to point to me,
Now I'm protecting it.
It was the reader's CONS
That made it, paired by dot;
Now, GC, for the nonce,
Thou shalt reclaim it not.
Quaxity quuxity,
Backus's BNF
Drives a preprocessor,
Generates code.
Parsing is specified
Metasyntactically;
Writing it's easy, but
reading, I'm snowed.
(if any of these snippets struck your fancy, look up that Fortress dude; there's much more)
Why is it not poetry? Poetry is about format, it isn’t really subjective to the same degree as other types of art. You could argue it’s bad poetry, but it’s definitely poetry.
The Iliad and Odyssey and the Icelandic Sagas are in large part about killing people and Persian classical poetry is about the joys of wine so why not?
...and post-muslim persian poetry is about the love of allah, cleverly disguised inside a metaphor of the joys of wine, so Ms Ciccone was neither as novel nor as blasphemous as she was portrayed in the late twentieth century.
There was a time when lots of people read and wrote poetry that was meant to be enjoyed. With modernism this on ramp of poetry that was accessible disappeared, leaving only poetry enjoyable by wannabe poets. Poets, like literary novelists, write for their own pleasure or that of those who can offer them jobs (teaching MFAs, writers in residence, spiritually similar things). There’s no source of genuinely popular contemporary poetry in English and no reason to believe that there ever will be again.
Are we sure that αὐλητής etc. didn't accompany poetic recitals at symposia?
My classics teachers mentioned the possibility of musical accompaniment, and length instead of stress oriented metres would also point in that direction?
There are tons of people who read poetry for fun -- they leave their physical homes (!) and travel to this café down the street from me, where, on the night of the Tuesday, they do indeed bring their works and with one another "slam".
There is also hip hop, of course -- which saved my life, probably others as well -- halfway between music and verse
I read it and recite it. Not modern poetry, but ancient, in the language the poems were crafted in. I think reading modern poetry is a great way to learn to dislike it in general. If I had to guess, you've never been exposed to classical poetry. I used to be dismissive of it, until I encountered the good old stuff.
I've wondered this for years.
Like seriously, is there anyone who seriously reads poetry for fun nowadays?
I understand if it's the 1800s and there's literally nothing else to do.