Poetry is for everyone. Poetry is about our everyday lives.

You’re Doing What?

When I first started telling friends that I planned to publish a book of poetry this fall [2004], it was almost humorous to see the “run for cover” look in their eyes. Over the last half century, poetry has become a lost medium in our society. Both readers and writers have been wandering in a forest of tangled words and messages.

Let me first admit that although I have been writing poetry for over forty years, I am not an expert on poetry. Far from it. I have been lost along with many others, when it comes to understanding a lot of what has been written in recent decades.

In a stampede out of the sixties, poets tripped over themselves to discard the conventions of the past, and to write in new and adventurous ways. Most of the disciplines were dumped over the side in favor of free verse experiments. These efforts unfortunately coincided with some other experimentation that left readers wondering where the whole genre was going. Poets seemed to lose their connection with the general public. The poetry may have been very good but many of us could not connect and moved on to other things.

The result has been that, in many places, poetry has fallen off the radar screen of popular work. There are some major exceptions, including some wonderful writers who live in New Hampshire, but in general, the market for new poetry has been microscopic. I believe that much of this is the fault of the writers. Many got bogged down in personal politics, promoting causes, ego-enhancement, and self-directed therapy sessions, and they forgot about relating to the reader. And after a little thought, the reader decided that he or she had better things to do than to enter those quicksand worlds.

I walked into a fairly large bookstore the other day that no longer even has a poetry section. It is startling to see the way this has changed from the first hundred and seventy-five years of our history, when poets were idolized and almost heroic in stature. There is still a high level of appreciation for some of our most treasured writers, such as was displayed at the recent celebration of Donald Hall’s birthday. But I doubt if we ever get back to the days when Longfellow, Whitman and Poe, or Sandburg, Frost and Dickinson were household names. There are a variety of reasons, however, why poetry could once again become a happy and welcomed option for the general public.

1. The younger generation already has developed a modern version of beat poets. These rappers make lots of money and sell lots of recordings talking about a street life that relates to a very small percentage of our culture. They chant it to a beat, the words are thrown out there like litter, and most of it is drivel, but it sells well.

2. Poetry in general is almost perfectly attuned to the pace of modern society. It can be read in short bursts that fit right in with the one to three minute attention spans of our TV-trained population.

3. Poetry is amazingly flexible in all of its forms. It can challenge the reader and writer in lots of different ways, and convey the whole range of emotions in a compact delivery.

4. Most readers have dabbled in poetry at one time or another. This allows it to take on a participatory type of relationship with readers in some environments.

5. The reader can connect quickly with the message or theme of a book of poetry. And if it does connect, it can be read many times versus the one time hit or miss approach of most books.

The thing that finally convinced me, however, that a market for reader-friendly poetry was really out there, was last year when I was watching a blow-out Red Sox game. Jerry Remy and Sean McDonough were trying to kill some time and they started fooling around with some haiku about the team. The response was amazing. Over the next two weeks, all sorts of fans started sending in their own contributions. The original couch potatoes, at least in some people’s minds, were jumping all over haiku. That really did it for me. If we sports fans can still have some fun with poetry, why can’t the rest of the public?

So, after forty years of writing this stuff, I am finally going to take the plunge and publish some. But regardless of whether my book is well-received, it seems that the time is right for the general public and poetry to forget old quarrels and get back together. I think if poets make a little more effort to relate to the reader and to write about things that are common to both, there is a good chance the readers will return. Maybe we will even see the return of “poetry sections” in some of the stores that now seem to only focus on the latest best-sellers.

In the meantime, it is probably still not safe to stand in front of an exit if someone yells “poetry.”

Read selections from Glenn K. Currie's Daydreams or Riding in Boxcars or from the latest book: A Boy's First Diary by clicking on the title that's caught your fancy.