[Quiet Man Cometh]

So, yoink!

Originally Posted by Suzerain of Sheol

On the subject of poetic criticism, I find this a rather interesting read, though it isn't exactly in line with my thoughts on the matter.

I suppose I'm something of a poetic nihilist, in that I see poetry as a dead form of art, something engaged in for wholly self-indulgent purposes. There are, sadly, far, far more poets in the world then there are readers of poetry. I could go off on a tangent about how writing of any kind comes down to communication (and, more fundamentally, community), semantic structures providing a medium through which ideas can be exchanged, but, as I said, I feel that poetry in the last century has become entirely saturated and lost to all relevance. To make an example of what you said, it is, in many ways, about the poet's emotions, in that it is a pursuit mired largely in vanity, and at best, a quasi-artistic hobby. It doesn't, and hasn't in a long time, communicate much of anything beyond the poet's state of mind at the time of the writing. A curiosity.

That isn't to say there's no room for discussion, however. Honestly, the only sort of recognition a poet is going to get in our postmodern age is among his or her peers. In that sense, it remains a dialogue, albeit one of particularly colloquial parameters. You can represent poets as a subsection of the human system engaging in a form of discourse unique to themselves, and could derive sufficient semantic merit from that to call poetry a kind of art, but outside that circle of relevance, poetry simply falls away. And if you deny that very dialogue, you're left with only the poet in stasis, isolated in a room of mirrors. Ideas can't mature or evolve without communication.

*snitched from another trade to avoid the usurping of said thread with non-topic chatter. No worries, Sheol know about this. ;)*

This got me thinking about the nature of poetry, especially in contemporary times. I know that there has been comments made about the dwindling relevance of poetry today, or whether it can be said to have any relevance at all.

How many people here actually read poetry as well as write the stuff? I like to say I'm literary minded but I definately write more than I read when I take out the mandatory reading from school assignments and the like. I doubt I could name more than a couple poets who's work I read that were writing in the past 10 years. There don't seem to be a shortage or poetry writers, but how many people are inclined to read poetry beyond what they've written for themselves?

These are just open comments here, not focusing on any poet in particular.

On the communication end, that got me thinking about the poetic "conversations" that were engaged in back in the 19th century. Poetry evolved over time with changes in communication and topic. If there is an idea of what makes a poem now, what is it?

I think I need to streamline my brain a little here before talking much more. I feel like I have a ball of yarn and I'm not sure which end to pull at.

So relevance or communication, what are your thoughts on them?