The title of this blog post isn't an allusion to my absence on these pages for the past ten plus days. Rather, it's a statement made on behalf of poetry. Earlier this week, Washington Post blogger Alexandra Petri wrote a post entitled, "Is Poetry Dead?" that's been generating a lot of conversation.
I'm not going to critique that article point by point, primarily because it would take too long and I have a lot to do today. Plus over 300 other readers of the post have done just that so you can read for yourself their comments, some of which are insightful and point to critiques on other blogs.
For a much better state of poetry address, I recommend poet Dana Gioia's article from The Atlantic.
Although Gioia's essay is over two decades old now and predates the recent trend to move poetry out of the subculture of the institution as Gioia describes it, into the populist realm. Project such as Poetry 180, The Poetry Project, and Poetry Everywhere, the rise of poetry slams in the mid-1990s that made the form relevant to a new audience, even the blossoming of the blog-o-sphere are all signs poetry has a strong, healthy heartbeat if you know where to listen for it.
And maybe that's Ms. Petri's problem, she doesn't know where to listen. And, I daresay, she doesn't know what she's listening for. In her article she writes, "You can tell that a medium is still vital by posing the question: Can it change anything?" I'd argue that in that statement alone she misses the point about poetry altogether.
The better question to ask is not, "Can a poem change anything?" but "Can a poem change anyone?"
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