Loyal and particularly alert Slog readers may have noticed a considerable uptick in poetry content on the blog. As with all things involving poetry, the reason for this is mostly practical.
I’ve studied, taught, and written poetry for years. For that reason, random things throughout the day remind me of certain poems, and since we’re all supposed to write what we know, why not offer readers a little news that stays news along with the news? After all, to quote another Modernist, “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”
But the even more practical reason involves the genre’s length. As the shortest and most potent literary form, readers can consume poetry much more quickly than novels or even short stories. This feature has served poetry well over time, as the early/mid 20th century demonstrates.
During World War II, for example, paper rationing in England made books and magazines scarce. Teachers assigned poems and short stories rather than novels to save paper for the war effort, and soldiers found small but durable poetry volumes more convenient to carry around. As Eric Falci notes from his reading of Stephen Spender in The Cambridge Introduction to British Poetry 1945-2010, “despite paper rationing, the sales of poetry increased, and even the less-known poets could reckon their sales as between 2,000 and 4,000 instead of in the hundreds, as would have been their circulation before the war.”
Though we don’t appear to have any shortage of non-toilet paper, at least, poetry appears yet again to be on the up-and-up, mostly because its shortness makes it easier to share. In 2018, the National Endowment for the Arts found that poetry readers had doubled in the previous four years, thanks largely, Quartz agues, to Instagram and the growing popularity of performance poetry.
Novels or nonfiction works, which obviously still eclipse poetry in terms of book sales, may begin to flourish more now that some people have more time on their hands. But throughout history, readers have turned to poetry for guidance and solidarity (and fun jokes!) to navigate the rough emotional terrain that gets rougher when things like pandemics sweep the globe and entire economies nosedive.
In her essay “After Tennyson,” Dr. Samantha Matthews says paper rationing also sent readers back to “old books, seeking the comfort and familiarity associated with the ‘classics’ in periods of trauma.” I’m certainly feeling a little bit like that, though I find some comfort in a lot of contemporary writers, too, if only because their work stands as evidence that poetry is still alive, or at least undead.
