Is Poetry a Dying Art Form?

Today I want to write about a question that pops up every now and again: is poetry is still relevant? Is it even... still a thing?

First of all, I am not a neutral responder on this subject, having recently founded this business dedicated to the life-changing magic of poetry. So, is poetry a dying at form? It better not be!

Luckily for me, evidence seems to back up my wishful thinking. So let’s get into it: Is poetry dead?

People are reading lots of poetry

The truth is that readership has fluctuated over time. In 2009 a Newsweek headline declared, “Poetry Readership At 16-Year-Low; Is Verse Dying?” But people’s taste in film genres also fluctuates in relation to world events, and it doesn’t seem like anyone clutches their pearls over whether comedies are dead.

^{A small sampling of the endless "Is poetry dead" discourse. Here, I screen grabbed a cluster of internet search results inviting me to click through to versions of the question on Quora.}

 Not even a decade after that Newsweek article, the National Endowment for the Arts ran a big study in 2017 called the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), and released the results the next year. Among their findings was that nearly 12% of adults had read poetry that year. That’s 28 million people!

“As a share of the total U.S. adult population, this poetry readership is the highest on record over a 15-year period of conducting the SPPA,” according to the NEA.

You can explore more of the survey’s findings here: “Taking Note: Poetry Reading is Up--Federal Survey Results.”

You’ll find some neat breakdowns of poetry readership among various demographic groups, like age, race, and gender. A few highlights: young adults (ages 18-24) led the pack, readership among adults with only some college education showed sharp increases, and people in both urban and rural areas read poetry at even rates.

In the UK, 2018 was a record year of sales for poetry: “Poetry sales soar as political millennials search for clarity.” The Guardian points out that a similar boom in poetry’s popularity occurred during the miners’ strike of 1980, as well as during the working class movements of the 19th century.

More people are also writing poetry

While many poets are indeed dead, many are alive, and many are not even born yet.

A comprehensive report on the state of college and university English departments from 2016-2017 found that “Creative writing and other writing specializations were the mostly likely tracks to see increased or unchanged enrollments,” reported Inside Higher Ed.

In 2017, AP reported: “Demand booming on college campuses for creative writing.” (Note, that article seems to no longer load, but I’ve linked to the cached version.)

Now, neither one of those sources distinguishes between genres of creative writing (like how much of the demand is for poetry specifically). Also, they're both limited to the context of higher education, which is only one slice of where poets write poems. They do confirm what I personally encountered as a professor of creative writing and poetry workshops at a college, which is intense undergraduate interest.

Still, it's my sense that overall, more people are reading poetry than writing it. And to be honest with you, that hunch is partly why I founded Spellworks.

^{Thank you to my friend James Estrada for giving me this beautiful wearable button in turquoise and purple that says "Some Poets Are Alive." The button was made by Kimberly Grabowski Strayer.} 

I know from my decade of teaching that reading poems and writing poems are closely linked pleasures. Mutually supportive practices that together, keep poetry alive, vibrant, circulating, and evolving.

You read a poem and think…. damn, I wish I could write like that. I never knew you could do that in a poem. And all of these responses can send you to the page, where you enter into conversation with poetry you've read while simultaneously expanding what "poetry" even refers to, by adding to it. All of that can happen with the right encouragement.

Or, you might read a poem and think, I could never write like that. But consider that most of the time when you read a poem, you're reading a published poem that has been revised many times, and not the discarded drafts that ended up in that writer’s recycling bin, never to meet the light of day!

With so many adults reading poetry, part of what I hope to do is support people in writing it, too. Anyone can write a poem. If you think you are somehow the exception, well, stick around. I promise that you too can write a poem.

Even if you are not reading or writing poems yet, it is never too late. Hopefully, by now, I have put the myth to rest of whether poetry is dying out.

Let me get serious for a moment

I’m thinking of poets who have been targeted for their poetry, in just the last couple of years. I think of Ahnaf Jazeem. I think of Dareen Tatour. Selahattin Demirtaş. Zhang Guiqi. Khet Thi. Jose Bello, arrested by ICE and threatened with deportation, for a poem he shared.

And these are only the instances I know about from the news. (By the way, if you’d like to read more on this, check out this short piece “Poets are targeted because...” by Abraham T. Zere.)

So, how could poetry be a dying art form?

I think sometimes people ask this question of the most mysterious things, as a way to try to understand what's possible in the world we live in. Is that a holy face in my tortilla? Is Elvis alive? And so on.

Practices of poetry date back to at least prehistoric times, and continue to evolve. Poetry bends and adapts, not on its own, but because people bend and adapt it. 

If readership does wane sometimes according to public survey measurements, it seems to me like a trick candle. Don't be the fool declaring poetry's gone out!