The future of poetry, as I see it
It’s hard to talk about the future without some sense of history. And many, all too many, discussions about contemporary poetry are completely ahistorical. This insistence on poetry being exclusively personal, centered on individual experience: how long has that been around? Since the early twentieth century? Not that there hasn’t been personal poetry almost as long as we have written records of language; but the dogma of experience is new. And yet, poets talk as if it were the only kind of poetry that ever existed, as if it were synonymous with poetry.
Same goes for free verse. Since many English-speakers read world poetry only in translation, it’s easy to not realize how much of it is and has been formal. The Sufi poets who are beginning to be translated wrote largely in the traditional forms of the Middle East; ghazals and rhymed couplets especially. Much classical Greek poetry was metered and meant to be sung to a tune, with musical accompaniment. Similarly, classical Chinese poetry was highly formalized both in sound quality (rhyme and meter) and in content and style.
Rhymed couplets, of course, are common to the poetic traditions of many countries and are still widely in use in English, particularly in songwriting (I refuse to recognize a distinction between songwriting and poetry). The ghazal is undergoing something of a revival in English, with an online journal devoted entirely to its various subforms. Modern metricists have revived a few characteristic Greek meters, like the sapphic: I’ve written one poem in this meter; the only way I managed to do it was to sing the lines in my head. As for classical Chinese poetry, I’m afraid it would be flat-out impossible to reproduce the forms of a tonal language in English.
I’m talking a lot about the past because I find it really difficult to imagine where poetry is going for the future. More to the point, I don’t see any single direction that I think poetry is going to go; if anything, I see the poetry world becoming more fragmented and spinning off in multiple directions. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.
The only things I think I can say for sure: More online and partly online poetry journals. (That’s an easy prediction based on what I’ve seen in the last 5 years.) More e-publishing. More churn among small presses: and isn’t the word “press” becoming a charming anachronism, like “footage” in movies? I don’t see the industry shaking out into a few large players, as may happen with e-publishing of prose; I don’t think there is, or ever will be, enough money in poetry to drive that kind of corporate consolidation.
What I’m hoping is that someone will come up with a good e-pub mechanism specifically for poetry. Smashwords is OK for plain left-justified or center-aligned poetry (centered poetry makes my eyeballs bleed, but some people like it), but any more complex arrangement is just not e-friendly. On my blog, I’ve had to post my experiments in non-linear poetry and concrete poetry as pdfs. Embedding such poems as images in an e-publishable text file is doable, but difficult, and there’s a substantial learning threshold for people who aren’t already computer-savvy.
Another trend: video and audio recordings of poetry are becoming more common. New poetry books from major publishers now commonly appear with CDs or DVDs attached in the front. This really represents a return to poetry’s roots. Cheap, widespread printing transformed it from something most people experienced as hearing to something most people encountered on paper. Cheap, widespread recording may drive that at least partway back; it’s still easier for most people to sit down and type out a poem than to record it, and blogging sound files isn’t as easy as it should be, but it’s not really hard. I suspect it’ll end up similar to where recorded music is: there’s still a big market for purely audio recordings, but “the video” is an aspect of music that can’t be ignored. In the same way, most people will still probably encounter poetry primarily as a written form, but the aural/video aspect will be there to be found.
People keep talking about the potential of hypertext and other web-based information structures to transform the way we think about literature. (More realistically, to add new ways of thinking without necessarily replacing old ones.) This conversation was going on as far as back as Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics (2000)– but if you look at online comics now, there’s brilliant art, great story, some terrific comics, but the form has not really changed.
The same’s pretty much true in poetry. I’ve played around a bit with non-linear presentations like nodemaps: the technology was clunky at the time, but it seemed to have real potential for certain types of poetry. I may get back to that in the future. What would be really spiffy would be an audio nodemap…
What the Internet has really done– and this applies to poetry, music, comics, fiction and pretty much every other form of creativity I can think of– is change the marketing game. Almost anyone who’s capable of generating a product can get it on the web; anyone who gets it on the web can attract readers. Traditional publishing avenues, like newspaper franchises for daily comics, publishing contracts for novels or poetry collections, recording contracts for musicians, are shrinking in volume and becoming increasingly risk-averse: that makes it harder and harder for new writers, singers, etc. to break into the traditional market. At the same time, web-based indies reliant on print-on-demand or e-pub or YouTube or just plain HTML are burgeoning.
Are they making money? Mixed, so far. But– getting back to poetry specifically– have we ever made money? Not most of us. And that, of all things, isn’t likely to change in the foreseeable future.
Wow, what a great post.
I love poetry, and wish there was a bigger market for it right now. I really wish some of the independent and small press authors would embrace it and write more. I see poetry books online, but for purchase, they can sometimes get very expensive.
I actually have a poetry project in the works, slowly working out details. I decided to create a horror poetry project… an epic poem that tells a story. When I market it, I joke and say it’s a mix between Stephen King and Dr. Seuss.
For example, the first story is called The Killer & She. It’s about a woman who is home alone and a man breaks in to kill her. It was 26 handwritten pages.
Since that launch, I’ve rethought my process… I’m going to create a seperate site for my my poetry – and open it to the poetry of others. Anything to stimulate the community and get people to write some verses! I’m also going to expand the project and offer an audio version of the book when they buy it. (I got this idea after a reviewer of The Killer & She suggested it…). Finally, I’m going to bust my butt to make sure it’s low in price. Meaning that for the ebook, including the audio, I’m keeping it at $0.99. Sure, I won’t make a living off it, but it’s poetry. It’s soul. It’s something we need in our lives.
Again, this was a great post Tiel. I really hope to see a revival and bigger community for poetry.
-Jim
Really interesting article. I love the idea of non-linear anything. I’m not familiar with nodemaps but you can bet I’ll be learning more about it. I’m in total agreement with center-aligned poetry. I enjoy a more organic styling and like it when the formatting fits the feel of the piece. I think this is where epub is currently lacking. Devices like the Kindle would have a hard time displaying nontraditional formatting exactly as the artist intended me to view it. That said I do think the “print-on-demand” services such as Blurb and Adoramapix (A photo printing service with flexible formatting options for text too) are beginning to target artists as well as just ‘straight-up” writers which is exciting.
I too would like to see a poetry revival. Outside of song writing that is. I’m not knocking song writing at all, but I’d be happy to see more poetry which allows me make my own interpretations.
~chris