This started as a comment but became a blog post, and it’s something I’ve been teasing around since
this article appeared in the Washington Post, noticing that Americans aren’t reading much poetry, and that readership has been declining over time. I personally don’t read much poetry either, even though in college I was engaged with it quite a lot – I was an English major that took Poetry writing courses, went to slams, participated in readings, the whole deal. So I want to emphasize that while I’m asking ‘why aren’t people reading poetry?’ I’m not doing so with a veiled ‘Because it succkkkkkks’ implication. Instead, I think its main problem is that is fundamentally a different mode of expression than how younger Americans engage with entertainment.
More-entrenched stand-up comics like Jerry Seinfeld are running into difficulties that I think are essentially the same as those faced by poets, and the differences of opinion on the modern state of comedy are pretty striking. In 2013, John Cleese declared the Golden Age of Comedy to be over, whereas Vulture claims it’s just beginning. Seinfeld claims he won’t go to college campuses anymore because they’re too ‘PC,’ but my students were eager to see Bo Burnham when he came to UW-Eau Claire this past year. Young people are clearly hungry for humor, and it needn’t all be safe and boring either. So why is Seinfeld floundering? It would be easy to take an ageist approach, as Seinfeld has done with students, and make claims that he’s a privileged, out-of-touch old white man who’s been telling the same jokes for 30 years and people are sick of him. It would be easy, and satisfying (very satisfying, in fact!) to say such things, but much like Seinfeld’s own observational humor, it would be shallow and ultimately pointless. Because even if, like George Carlin, he adapted his jokes to fit the times, it would still not be sufficient. Why is this, and why am I talking about comedy when I started with poetry? A quote from Nathan Rabin’s LA Times piece might help:
“Seinfeld and Maher are perhaps as uncomfortable with modern mainstream sensitivities as with the modern expectation of interaction between an entertainer and the audience.”
Stand-up comedy (and poetry) has traditionally been pretty unidirectional and individualized, whereas a lot of present-day entertainment is extremely collective. The role of present-day entertainment is as discussion facilitator – the new episode of <show/Amy Schumer YouTube video> comes out and then people run off to the internet to tweet and ship and argue. I think folks like Seinfeld are used to thinking that they’re providing *the complete product,* just sit back and enjoy! They don’t understand why someone would dissect the living crap out of what they say, even though entertainment now *is* dissection – people didn’t flock to live-tweet Sharknado 2 because it was a great movie – it was just the thing that sparked the live-tweeting itself. And crucial to this is the implied understanding that everyone has a voice – your tweet might not be the one that gets shared the most, but you were in the discussion, same as everyone else.
This could be seen on Reddit while
‘The Button’ was active – on April 1st a button appeared that each user was only allowed to press once. It ticked down from 60 seconds to 0, and a press reset the timer. What would happen when it hit 0?? Over a million people came to press it, and since pressing at different times gave different-colored forum flair, there were soon dedicated camps – ‘
Followers of the Shade‘ who vowed never to press, ‘
The Redguard‘ who had red flair, and so on. The lore of The Button expanded wildly over the course of two months, with memes, artwork, logos, and mock-fury all arising out of a single button. Crucial to this, however, was the understanding that the button itself was fair – that if you pressed at the time displayed, you’d get the appropriate flair. Thus, there was a small revolt when the creator of the thread ‘pulled rank’ to sort out some technical issues and assigned flair based on their own personal discretion. This broke the fantasy that everyone had an equal say in establishing the subreddit’s lore, and many people abandoned the subreddit at this point.
A vital takeaway from the Button is that the button itself, *while the focal point,* did not generate any of the actual content. It spurred conversation without *being* the conversation. It was the facilitator.
Stand-up comics that are used to being the single focal point of the discussion are going to be shocked that they’re just one voice among many, *even if they’re leading the discussion.* And while his view isn’t universal among comics, Patton Oswalt isn’t pleased when another voice chimes in: “‘Hecklers don’t make a show memorable. They prevent a show from being a fucking show.”
And back to poetry, it’s a similar situation – at a reading, nobody asks a poet questions. They stand up, read, and sit down. This isn’t to say that poetry doesn’t spark discussion, consideration, debate, and so on, but the *performance* of poetry doesn’t include those aspects. The orator speaks, the audience listens. And to some degree, the poet is rather unassailable – much of poetry is intensely personal experiences and impressions. I can disagree with what you said or how you said it, but I can’t disagree that it was what you felt. And indeed, much of the point of reading poetry in the first place is to see the world as someone else does – in a Sapir-Whorfian way, the language of another’s mind reshapes *your* mind, and what you’re able to think.
But for better or worse, this fundamentally clashes with present-day entertainment-as-collective assembly/dissection. A single voice telling us how it is isn’t what we want, regardless of how well-spoken that voice is. We are a generation that wants to lay out the Legos and see what we can come up with, rather than following the instructions in the box. The top-selling video game right now is Minecraft, which is the (currently) ultimate pile of Legos one could have. Worth noting is that Minecraft can’t be ‘won,’ even if you do something
amazing in it. People share their creations with each other, and might even have favorites or things they declare the best, but even then it’s just one iteration among many.
A (possible) downside of this is that a goal of such entertainment is shared, collective, experience. The dissection and assembly process is participated in by all, which means that discussion will be steered like a Ouija board toward a somewhat united outcome. Poetry and stand-up comedy have taken a much different approach – in these, the orator presents the finished piece, and leaves it to the audience to decide what to do with it. Laugh, cry, rant, debate, all of those are options, but the piece itself is what it is.
In any case, I’m not presenting any sort of condemnation of poetry or stand-up comedy. I don’t think poetry’s lack of readership is due to hostility – I think it’s an interfacing problem. It doesn’t match up to our present understanding of entertainment, so for a lot of people, it simply isn’t entertaining or engaging. It’d be kind of like if the poetry was in a foreign language – even if it’s really excellent poetry, it’s incomprehensible to most people. I think for the moment, at least, lone orators are going to be pretty lonely unless they can get some more people in on the conversation.
Addendum: I’d add the *production* of poetry is often extremely collaborative – workshopping is an excellent example of this. But the reading/performance of it is not. Also problematic is that most people feel equipped to discuss something like Game of Thrones, but do not feel capable of talking about poetry. “What if I got it wrong/misunderstood?” The shared dissection model of entertainment encourages everyone to be on the same page – I know Dr. Who canon even though I don’t freakin’ watch Dr. Who. But for many people, the references of poetry are opaque and impenetrable. If I said anything about the ‘rays of Phoebus,’ it would be a reference most people wouldn’t understand. This adds an in-group arcaneness to poetry that really, really clashes with most entertainment right now. Fandoms definitely exist, but my impression is that most engagement with entertainment focuses on inclusion – more people that catch the reference means more dissection, richer discussion and tweeting. Any kind of exclusionary move (shutting up hecklers, demanding the floor, pulling rank, using obscure language as a barrier, asserting stronger intellect) will massively backfire.
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