Mastodawn

poetry lost cultural relevance because it deconstructed itself past the point where anyone could tell the difference between good and bad

a bad sonnet is clearly bad. with a bad free verse poem it just doesn't hit right but you feel like an asshole for questioning it

the forms that do still reach people, hip hop, spoken word, lyrics, kept the constraints. kept the music. poetry deregulated itself into irrelevance

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Null 4d ago

@Taweret I kinda have complex views of this.

I generally feel that like literature, poetry fell into a trap of academic and class isolation. Like literature, it became too over analyzed and sanitized, and through the vehicle of public education, was reduced from a vehicle of expression to things on a test with a correct answer. Poetry's gift has always been that it's something that one can turn out and consume quicker than a book or a play; a tiktok of expression. But its teaching caused it to fall from common favor, then drop from curriculum("Why are we teaching this?"), leading to a state where very few on the street can tell a 'good poem'.

I think the rise of free-form is a symptom of popular collapse rather than a cause. Disorganization and ambiguity follow a collapse. Those who are 'professional poets' operate in near voids compared to their past peers, and people coming to it now are far less versed in the particulars of structured poetry. You're far less able to bend the rules when every oink on the street knows the rulebook. Without that feedback, It's essentially anarchy.

I'd argue this is why Hip hop remains. It did not collapse in the same way, and so, it retained a 'society' that governs it. It remains popular in the public eye, and thus enough people know the rules when an artist goes off script.

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Virginicus

@NullNowhere @Taweret Another piece of the blame goes to printing. Now that we have all the old poems ready to hand, a poet who doesn’t want to compete with (e.g.) Shakespeare can’t write a sonnet, so has to find a new form in which to write.