Poetry is dead. Oh, April is National Poetry Month!

This being National Poetry Month, it is as good a time as any to admit to this much: I rarely, if ever, read the poems in the New Yorker, whose contents I look forward to every week.  I do not find them remotely interesting or informative.  It is simply blah!

I loved poems when I was younger.  In English, yes. In Thamizh. And, even the ones we studied in the Sanskrit curriculum.  Even now, when I am in the mood for a poem, I do not turn to the New Yorker or anything contemporary.  Instead, it is the old ones that appeal to me.  They seem way more profound, and appealing to my emotions of that moment compared to the newer ones that are all flaky.  The rare times that I read anything contemporary, I think that maybe I, too, can become a poet.

Joseph Epstein writes about this in the WSJ:

Like so many people of my rapidly diminishing generation, I walk around with lines and entire passages from the poetry of W.B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, and others rattling around pleasantly in my head. But nearly all the poetry written since the years those poets wrote doesn't register, resonate, ring, do any of the elevating things that poetry is supposed to, and once indeed did, do.

When I read essays like this, I feel convinced, yet again, that despite all the non-conforming attitudes that I display, I am, at heart, a traditionalist.  A neo-traditionalist, as I sometimes describe myself.

Back in Bakersfield, I remember two poetry reading sessions that I attended.  Both were big time poets, and university professors as well.  But, I remember only one of them being awesome, and I even remember the name even after all these years: Frank Bidart.

Yes, Bidart being a native son registered in my memory, as did the controversy related to his sexualtity.    But, those were about Bidart the person about which I couldn't care less.  I remember being drawn into the poem he read.  It was in the old style of epic poems.  I wished that it wouldn't end and that Bidart would continue on.  But, yes, all good things do come to an end.

The other poet was Philip Levine, who had a much shorter drive to make, from Fresno.  I couldn't understand the poems he read, and couldn't wait for the event to end.  Interestingly enough, it seems that Levine is the more celebrated poet, even up to the rank of US Poet Laureate.

So, why is poetry dead?  In noting that "the poetry game is over, kaput, fini, time, gentlemen, time" Epstein explains:

Years ago I wrote an essay on this subject called "Who Killed Poetry?," which stirred up beehives of poets in protest. I suggested that the academicization of poetry did a lot to help kill it; I also concluded that too much poetry was in production, with Gresham's Law relentlessly at work, in this instance the crappy driving out the second-rate. I also concluded that so many people who drifted into the writing of poetry didn't have very interesting minds: a family member dies, they saw a tree of unusual shape, a little-known Matisse painting excited them, so they take to their computers and trivialize the subject or experience by encasing it in a more or less complex contraption of verbal self-absorption currently called a poem.

Come to think of it, I think I didn't like Levine because his came across to me as word play, while Bidart gave me substantive matter to think about.

I shall, therefore, keep going back to the classics.  Some of my own posts reveal my preference for the kinds of poems that appeal to me:

• Back in April 2009, I blogged about Das war schön
• On life and death--a favored obsession of mine--in which I often refer to John Updike's Requiem
• This post on knowledge and wisdom is a twofer--Tennyson and Auden
• Rumi's advice on how to live
• The translation of the lyrics of one of my favorite Hindi film songs ever, from the movie Pyaasa (thirsty)
• A poem, which is almost an atheist anthem: The laws of god
• The young Russophile in me falling in love with Dr. Zhivago and why I cherish Pasternak's After the storm
• Faiz Ahmed Faiz's powerful poem on the freedom of speech
• This post where I admit to be an old-timer in such tastes and I quote Shakespeare
• A favorite of my father's: Abou Ben Adhem
• And, perhaps the one that I quote more often than any other poem, because of the political aspects that drive so much of my blog posts: e.e. cummings' next to of course god america i, which was one of my earliest posts after I restarted this blog in 2008.

Poetry forever!

Vijay, a classmate throughout the school days,
is now a poet/critic/writer