31. Adam Kirschs Standpunkt

zur Debatte ist meiner:

Nor is it easy to make the case that poetry is more unpopular today than it has been in most of history. There have been periods when poetry was genuinely popular—a significant number of people in nineteenth-century England bought Tennyson’s books—but such ages are the exception. In absolute terms, far more people are professionally involved with poetry today—as writers or MFA students or English majors—than in the golden age of Wyatt and Surrey, when manuscripts were passed hand to hand among a small circle of courtiers. Indeed, the problem today might be that poetry has too many stakeholders—that it has lost the agility and ruthlessness that it possessed when it truly was a coterie art. A coterie at least has the advantage of definite taste and genuine intimacy. When Ezra Pound helped to make modernism, it was because he convinced 20 other poets to follow his lead.

Maybe the watchword of the future, then, should not be more accessibility and more popularity—the average book of poetry is, in fact, paralyzingly accessible, wearing its heart and its language on its sleeve—but rather, back to the coterie. Let the best poets find each other, read each other, and promote each other, as the best poets have always done. Let them ignore both the demands of the public and the demands of the poetry world, and write as they feel compelled to write. That is the only way to produce work that, in a hundred years, the Paxmans of the future will consider classic, and use to shame the poor poets of their time. / The new republic

• Dana Gioia sagt: Lyrik muß wieder relevant werden
• Franzobel sagt: Lyrik soll wieder reimen
• Kuno sagt: Lyrik muß wie meine oder Weigonis werden

So tobt die Schlacht.