I am no expert on poetry. I love reading poetry, but — like short fiction — I never think I read enough of it. And when I do read poetry, I tend to focus on the content and the imagery and what the words are saying. That’s a lot of the battle, to be sure, but I’ve never been worth a damn as far as analyzing the mechanics of poetry. I don’t know anything about “scansion”, I’m not well versed in matters of rhyme scheme and meter (hey, Jason, are there any good introductory books on this stuff?), and aside from the really obvious ones — sonnets, haiku — I don’t know anything about form in poetry. When I read Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle” years ago, I thought a lot about its meditations on death and dying, and I didn’t know until a couple of months ago that it follows a specific form (it’s a vilanelle, apparently).
So I don’t know if it’s true that poetry is dead. But somehow I doubt it.
I’m not equipped to really evaluate this guy’s arguments, except to note that his main claim seems to be that he can’t name a single contemporary poet, so poetry has ipso facto become irrelevant. Well, I can’t name a contemporary painter, and yet I doubt painting is dead; I don’t know of any contemporary dancers in ballet, and yet I doubt ballet is dead; and how may people can name a contemporary classical music composer?
If you look around, I suspect you’ll find that everything is dead to somebody. Poetry is dead. Classical music is dead. Film music is dead. Liberalism is dead. Conservatism is dead. Evolution is dead. History is dead. Baseball is dead. Fantasy is dead. Science fiction is dead. Blogging is dead. Good burgers are dead.
About the only thing that isn’t dead these days is Elvis.