May 1, 2001. National Poetry Month (which is the same month and goes by the same name in both Canada and the United States) has come and gone. Organized as a publicity event – a party for the media, on a level with most book awards – it could claim some success. But as a “celebration of poetry and its vital place” in our culture the results were almost certainly counterproductive. The media came not to praise poetry, but to bury it. And their chorus was a bitter elegy.
No one should have been surprised. It seems the only time we talk about poetry any more is to ask if it’s dead. But in some of the voices raised against poetry this year I thought I could sense a change in tone. As low as poetry has been, for so long, I wonder if things haven’t begun to take a turn for the worse.
Continue reading “The Morning After”