April is National Poetry Month in the United States. We don’t have a national book, or national painting, or national music month, so what does this month tell us about the state of contemporary poetry?
For over a hundred years it’s fair to say that poetry has been struggling for survival among seemingly more popular forms of cultural expression such as music, film, TV, and books. Whilst it is also true to say that nary a poet gets rich writing poems, the medium has survived just as Matthew Arnold predicted it would way back in 1888. In his essay on the effects of ‘corporate bookstores’ on the promulgation of literature, playwright David Kornhaber cites Arnold’s claim in The Study of Poetry “that great literature ‘never will lose supremacy. Currency and supremacy are insured to it, not indeed by the world’s deliberate and conscious choice, but by something far deeper–by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.’”
