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On 20 June 2015, my friend and former coworker, Dr. Jon Bakos, posted "What's the Deal with Poetry?" to his blog, We Brew Good, Like We Used to Could. In the piece, Bakos argues that the sharp decline in poetry readership stems from a disjunction between engagement with poetry and prevailing media consumption patterns. In his view, poetry is presented as a thing done, and contemporary audiences want a greater degree of interaction than such presentation permits. The argument is eloquent and well-articulated, raising a number of good points. I do not agree with it, however, at least not entirely.

I find, for instance, that the decline in poetry reading predates the advent of the interactive technologies Bakos cites as the major platforms for current discussion and dissection of media products. That is, people stopped or slowed their reading of poetry long before YouTube and Twitter arose to allow readers to see and comment aspersively on what they see.

I find also that the discussion of performance contexts needs to go far further. Admittedly, attendees of poetry readings do not typically field questions amid the performance. Neither do television actors. Nor do musicians who sell out concert arenas. Nor yet do many of myriad other performers and artists in live performance. Conflating a poetry reading with buying a volume of poetry and reading it is disingenuous and distracting; they are different phenomena entirely, and both differ from watching a posted video and commenting on it. (And, I might add, most of the poets I have known are pleased to have their works critiqued and dissected for their meanings.)

That said, Bakos raises several good points. He correctly identifies a participatory desire in the mainstream audience, a desire to feel part of a community that happens to be easily sated by discussion of mass-media events. Witness the traditional water-cooler talk about last night's game and the prospects for next season, or long-standing identifications of fandom, whether of television/cinematic properties or genres or performing musical groups (the KISS Army comes to mind, as does its refiguration or successor: the Juggalo)--among many others. And I do think there is a perception of poets, particularly, as "unassailable," although I think it is extended to many "traditional" literary artists. "Art is what you make of it," after all, so "How can you say any of it isn't good?" as my students have had it. (Easily, it turns out.) Less traditional media, less rarefied therefore, is more amenable to "popular" commentary and dissection. (Lawrence W. Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, although perhaps a bit dated, offers a useful discussion of the phenomenon.)

His Addendum is particularly telling in that regard; Bakos is spot-on in noting that many people do not feel qualified to discuss poetry. While I disagree in part with his assertions about inclusiveness--there is tension in fan communities about who real fans are, as Helen Young attests in "Race in Online Fantasy Fandom: Whiteness in Westeros.org" (Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 28.5 [2014]), and they are based in no small part on exclusionary discourses--the "in-group arcaneness" that Bakos mentions is very much afoot. I would assert that it is so in part because most people are taught badly; many teachers of English do not do well with the subject, or not so well as they need to to present it well. I have discussed the matter repeatedly before; the discussion is linked and need not be presented again here.

And it might be said, as well, that the "decline" in poetry readership is not an actual thing, but a perception hearkening back to a nostalgic idea that somehow people in the recent past were more attuned to poetry than "kids these days" are. I think the issue is more that access and dissemination spread further than they did in the mid-twentieth century. The sociocultural elite read poetry (as a class marker), and many of the elite thinkers still read poetry (as an aid to thinking). The availability of easy, largely passively consumed media, however, much as the easy availability of high-sugar and -salt foods, lends to emphasis of such media, and the greater access to public discussion forums and an increasing validation that peoples' opinions are to be expressed and attended account for the fact that there is more talk of things other than poetry as much as the bad teaching of verse does.