As you might recollect, gentle reader, I read a volume of Kaur’s poetry in 2022 and was not impressed, finding it to be just tweets.
But, hey, if that’s what gets the kids reading poetry these days.
One could also do a 18th Century Poet of Note versus My Friend Doug.
My friend Doug, whom I met when working at the grocery store when I was at the university, had a Lutheran high school education but not really the capacity to work anything but entry level jobs. But he liked to write letters, and he liked to write poetry, and he shared some of the latter with me. His work had long lines, some end-rhyming, and a lot of commas. Not a lot of vivid imagery, though, and not a lot of true rhythm.
Which is the only difference. I mean, you throw up any number of Keats’ poems side-by-side with Doug’s, and they’re not that far off–clearly Doug (and a certain blogger-slash-poet whose name we won’t mention) was influenced by that old timey poetry as to what poetry was and how it should look and read. And, to be honest, before radio, television, and Internet, some of the poetry was long enough to fill an evening with it as entertainment. Plus, so much of it refers to contemporaries and current events which are lost on us.
So I read a lot of the old junk and a lot of the new junk. And I write some new junk, which is somewhere between the tweets and the sonorous but archaic.
I read a lot because there are good nuggets in both, but most of it is not good and/or does not speak to me as an individual. But sometimes, it does.
Sudden thought which might be a thesis for further thought: Do we expect poetry to hit differently now? I mean, I look for a very evocative spark in the words that triggers a sharp emotional response. But that’s not really what they were going for then.
At any rate, meme via Wilder.
