Today's Poetry Sucks
June 21, 2023
Summer's here and I'm looking for new reading material to take to the beach.
Last year, I had a stack of poetry magazines that had accumulated over a period of years when I was most busy. This magazine is one of the most well known and revered for accepting only the best in current poetry.
I read it. The poetry sucked. I'm not just being hard on the writing because I am old school and venerate the works of Whitman, Longfellow, Poe, Dickinson, and middle to late twentieth century poets like Maya Angelou and Robert Frost. I'm critical because it stinks.
It was so bad that I took a look at the current Poet Laureate and the last four or five of the same. I must tell you, a sixth grader probably brought home better self-written poetry and their mom accidentally threw it in the trash. A pity.
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What happened to great poetry? What happened to the picturesque lines of Robert Burns or the thought provoking, even eviscerating, beauty of a Robert Frost verse?
I actually contacted the chief editor of the magazine who told me they don't print that kind of poetry anymore. Maybe it's too much to ask that a leading periodical on poetry feature the best in new poetry. Or maybe we've forgotten what good poetry is.
Perhaps in the middle of our rapping hip hop world we've forgotten what a true line of poetry is about. Paul Simon wrote, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls." The problem is that the subway has become too violent for people to stand and read the words.
It would be nice that, instead of trying be hip, cool, trendy, that someone actually printed some great poetry. I'd love to subscribe to a magazine where real poetry was resuscitated.