IS POETRY A DYING ART?

If anyone is taken aback by my title, they should be reminded that the attribution of mortality to poetry is nothing new. It is a century since Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley strove to “resuscitate the dead art of poetry.” Pound and his modernist allies gave poetry a new lease of life, but that too is now literary history.

Whether we are now postmodern is not a question that exercises me greatly, but I must say that at times I feel we are in a post-literary age. I had such an anti-epiphanic realization when a younger colleague whom I had offended (willfully, I confess) lashed out: “What do you think of yourself? You think you are a writer? Just because you scribble poetry?”

Touche! I conceded. Composition exercises in elementary school are dubbed “Creative Writing”, but one who “scribbles poetry” dare not call oneself a “writer”. The validity of the question in the title should be obvious.

Poetry certainly has become less visible on the shelves of libraries and bookstores. This was not the case even fifty years ago, when every major publisher proudly promoted an impressive poetry list. Anthologies of various kinds of verse, and poetry series abounded. And they travelled the world, ending up in bookstores that did brisk business in the urinous atmosphere around the old Dhaka Stadium.

Poetry publishing has become a fugitive enterprise, subsisting on meager subsidies. Most individual collections are self-published, and distributed free. While popular as well as quality fiction and non-fictional prose are co-published in several cities, even well-known poets appear in only one place and have a limited readership, coterie-based, regional, perhaps – in the case of a few lucky ones – national. How many living American or British poets are published on both sides of the Atlantic? You could count them on your fingertips, with the pinkies to spare.

It is a good thing that performance poetry has come to enjoy modest popularity in the Anglophone world. But it has an unavoidable tendency to go for accessibility and pounding rhythms, forgoing the struggle to pack in complexities of tone, emotion and thought.

In France the situation is even more dismal. There are self-absorbed coteries, no doubt, but a larger poetry scene is missing. Recent French poetry is hardly translated into English; the few anthologies of modern French poetry in English translation stop at Yves Bonnefoy or Phillippe Jacottet. True, there are marvelous institutions like the Place us Poeme in Ivry, headed by the poet Francis Combes, responsible for organizing lively Poetry Biennales; but the thrust of a unified sensibility into the poetic enterprise seems to be missing in the culture as a whole. Erik Orsonne, economist, adventurer, man of letters, winner of the 1988 Prix Goncourt, told me at a lunch hosted by our mutual friend Olivier Litvine, that much of French poetic talent is being channeled into chansons, while those who consider themselves serious poets have sadly taken to exploring the cul-de-sac of sterile linguistic experiment.

Is poetry then a dying art? It is facing a crisis no doubt, but all is not lost. The great poets of the last century, Yeats, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Rilke, Valery, Neruda, Milosz, Brodsky, Ginsberg, down to the still living Derek Walcott, are among the greatest of modern writers. There are fine younger poets in plenty of writing today. The economics of publishing may be unfavorable to poetry, but new avenues of dissemination, like the internet, can be used to good effect. This is a matter that calls for another article; I will stop for now.

Dr Kaiser Haq is a poet, translator, essayist, critic and academic.