Last year, I wrote an article for The Millions about the current state of poetry called "Americans Love Poetry but Not Poetry Books." I went in wondering if poetry’s relatively low book sales (compared to fiction or cookbooks or books of home decorating tips) meant that poetry was losing its audience, as so many articles (generally every April) claim.
What I discovered was that poetry's audience is vaster than ever—it’s simply that most of the audience doesn’t buy poetry. Although the book-buying audience is still smaller than any poet or publisher might like, there are vast legions of poetry-lovers who engage with poetry by watching people read aloud their favorite poem on the Favorite Poem project website, wandering through Poets House's outreach program in various zoos, opening their email to find The Academy of American Poets’ “Poem a Day” offering, or simply riding the subway and encountering one of The Poetry Society of America’s “Poetry in Motion” posters. In this way, poetry's smaller sales compared to its wide audience is comparable to the vast number people who stream music and movies rather than paying for them. It's not that people aren't actively engaging with poetry; they simply are doing so outside of bookstores.
Last April, Christopher Ingraham referenced my article, quoting my statement that “it’s possible the audience for poetry might be greater now than ever” for his blog on The Washington Post. My moment of being an Important Poetry Authority was promptly shattered by his next sentence, where he claimed that “[t]he numbers [from Google Analytics] show that that’s emphatically not the case.” Ingraham uses the steep downward slope of Google searches for ‘poetry’ over the past decade to support his claim that the art form is less important to readers today than in the past. His evidence seemed depressingly convincing until Academy of American Poets’ Executive Director Jen Benka, in an article on The Huffington Post, pointed out that his research is also incomplete. According to Benka, “if you use the search term ‘poem’ instead of ‘poetry’ you’ll see a much higher representation of interest."
At this point, I’ve given up on the debate about whether poetry “matters.” It matters to me. And it matters to many people I know–friends, students, family members. It seems so obvious that people still read poetry and write it and love it. One of the highest “liked” posts I’ve ever had on Facebook was a picture I took of one of the more recent Poetry in Motion subway posters: Heaven by Patrick Phillips. The vast majority of the people who gave it the disembodied “thumbs up” weren’t poets. Instead, they were readers who felt moved and wanted to share that. This sort of experience (along with photos of people’s vacations and babies and pets) is what I like best about Facebook: how often people post links to work that speaks to them so, when I scroll through my newsfeed, I often discover new poetry.
I believe the Internet has broadened poetry’s reach, in part because it is so much easier to share what we read now by reposting it on places like Facebook or Tumbler or WordPress or by tweeting out a link. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, The Atlantic’s Nicholas Carr proposed that reading online had turned him from a deep-sea diver into someone jet-skiing across the surface of things. I understand this. It takes me much longer to plunge deep into what I’m reading than I used to and I’m certainly more easily distracted, tugged away from my books by the lure of catching up on email or surfing the Net.
But I also think the Internet is perfectly suited for the associative quality of so much of modern poetry—the way we leap from line to line, image to image, idea to idea, tied together by the thread of some ever-evolving path…these feels exactly to me like clicking from link to link.
And it’s so much easier to find poetry now–not just the poems shared through social media, but also the ease of subscribing to the Academy's “Poem a Day” email or visiting Verse Daily or Poetry Daily. And the Internet has allowed online communities like this blog to grow: digital homes for those of us who love poetry to find each other and share our thoughts.
Speaking as an editor, were it not for the Internet, I’m not sure how many people would have discovered my press, nor would I know about many of the other newer independent presses out there. And without the ease of online submissions through places like Submittable, it would be almost impossible for our editorial board to read the manuscripts we receive and I’m sure poets would be circulating their manuscripts to far fewer presses if they had to print and ship their verse rather than click a button to upload a doc file.
With a decent Internet connection, it’s easy to fall into the rabbit hole and find poem after poem after poem in a way that wasn't possible when I was growing up in the dark ages of the 1980s. There are too many amazing online journals to list them all, but a few of my personal favorites are failbetter, Coconut, Blackbird and The Cortland Review.
When else was so much poetry so readily accessible—so easy to find and free? Never in the history of the world I suspect. Saying “Poetry is dead” is as pointless as asking if art is dead or if love is dead or debating Nietzsche’s famous statement about the mortality of God. We can argue these ideas endlessly, but the conversation is philosophical rather an exchange of mathematical proofs. People write poetry. People read poetry. We love it; it’s still here. It's been around for a long time. It will always be here.