Slide 1 : Sawadee Khrap! If the connection drops, give me 5 minutes to get back.
Slide 2 : Is Verse a Dying Technique?
1934 or thereabouts A young Edmund Wilson
Slide 3 : Some links to poet talk
Donald Hall
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16222
Death to the Death of Poetry
Dana Gioia
http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ecpm.htm
Can Poetry Matter
Slide 4 : Poetry, then, appears to be:
1. a vacuous synonym for excellence or unconsciousness. What else is common to the public perception of poetry?
2. It is universally agreed that no one reads it.
3. It is universally agreed that the nonreading of poetry is (a) contemporary and (b) progressive. From (a) it follows that sometime back (a wandering date, like "olden times" for a six-year-old) our ancestors read poems, and poets were rich and famous. From (b) it follows that every year fewer people read poems (or buy books or go to poetry readings) than the year before.
Other pieces of common knowledge:
4. Only poets read poetry.
5. Poets themselves are to blame because "poetry has lost its audience."
6. Everybody today knows that poetry is "useless and completely out of date"--as Flaubert put it in Bouvard and Pécuchet a century ago. Donald Hall: Death to the death of poetry While most readers and poets agree that "nobody reads poetry"--and we warm ourselves by the gregarious fires of our solitary art--maybe a multitude of nobodies assembles the great audience Whitman looked for. Whitman: To have great poets there must be great audiences, too.
Slide 5 : Dana Gioia: Can Poetry Matter We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, "I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself," . . . but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions. Robert Bly Hayden Carruth
Five Short-Shorts
Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
Is what uses us.
< http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/>
Slide 6 : Is Google making us stupid, by Nicholas Carr In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google