Poetry and the Masses

[ellajam]

I saw this discussion touched on in a thread, and thought it might make a good discussion here.

In my own words:

The idea was that poetry is too focused on grammar, structure, and highbrow words to appeal to the 6-7 billion people on this world. What we should do is move to something that appeals to the masses, and is more of a populous approach. This way would say: people like cliches for a reason, people aren't fond of grammar, or using a thesaurus.

If poetry is to be widespread it must come down from its self imposed perch.

I'm not trying to give a straw man argument just represent how I took the message.

My view, poetry has never been popular. If the answer is to lower the bar to gain popularity, I'd rather all poetry burn. I'd rather we all turned on reality TV, and forgot about it. I think this approach makes poetry nothing worth saving.

Art should move you. This insipid dumbing down of poetry wouldn't accomplish that purpose. It would make it no different than Muzak.

Maybe I'm preaching to the choir (cliche for the masses) or maybe I'm not.

Thoughts?

So many people, so much art. There's room for so much variety. Pollock, hate it today, love it tomorrow, just keep walking, genius, hack.

But there's always a craft to hang your art on. The reader, viewer, user will feel the difference when there's nothing solid underneath, if they bother to think about it. There's a joy and torture to honing a skill, a person does that for themselves, usually, at least in the later stages of developement. Whether it's valued by other people isn't the point, but often hard work and practice with a bit of inspiration is recognized on some level, by those who see the detail and nuance.

Unpunctuated cliches in common words has it's audience, I'm that audience and participant sometimes. No one's going to die over it. There's a place for everything but it's always good to be observant enough to realize where you are.