Sadly, Mr. McGonagall is a better poet than most working today.
Modern poetry fucking blows—take a look at the allegedly lyrical flotsam that spewed forth at Obama’s 2nd inauguration if you want proof of that.
No really, this is supposed to represent the best and brightest of American letters. No rhythm, no meter, no rhyme, that epitomizes everything that sucks about modern poetry. And that’s scarcely the only terrible, rhythmless poem out there.
So why is this the case? Why does modern poetry deliberately go out of its way to eschew meter, rhyme, or…really anything artistic at all? As something of a poet myself, I’d certainly like to know the answer to this.
My research tells me that free verse started to rule the roost of poetry around 100 years ago, and while it would be easy to assume that this was part of the overall “Fuck You, Dad!” reaction to the brutalities of World War 1, it appears to have actually gotten big around 1912, which puts that argument to pat. Indeed, free verse has existed for centuries write alongside form poetry.
By 1908, writers such as TE Hulme were advocating free verse, arguing that A) It has existed for millennia (just as I said), and that it was less stulted and more “liberated” than poetry that was forced to adhere to a strict rhyme scheme—in short, anybody could write poetry!
Hulme deliberately targeted this essay to attack the attitudes of members of the Poet’s Club of London, in particular it’s president Henry Simpson. While I’m certainly in favor of making the arts accessible to everybody and not just a privileged elite, somewhere along the lines of free verse being adopted, the elites got their hooks into free verse as well—and the gatekeepers of culture replaced strict rhyme schemes with sheer pretension—in other words, writing unreadable and dense poetry, and then implying that if you don’t *get* it, you’re obviously some stupid peasant.
While writers like BR Myers have discussed how American prose started to get needlessly pretentious in the 1970s and beyond (a combination of new writers not living interesting lives to base their fiction on and the unholy amalgamation of the publishing industry and English programs in universities only promoting unbearably dense hack writers to separate the cognitive “elite” from the peasantry), I don’t think anybody has specifically attacked this trend in poetry. But in my opinion it goes hand in hand with the decline of prose fiction.
And judging that “Sweet Boy Give Me Your Ass” hasn’t been thrown to the sands of time (or for that matter anything written by that hack Ginsberg), this has been going on for at least 50 years. And while I’m not naive enough to think that there was ever a time where the art “establishment” wasn’t inbred and insular to some extent—ie: being more about who you know rather than what you can do—at least they weren’t supporting out and out pederasts.
So what is to be done with the state of poetry? There are a few good poets working out there—and if you look hard enough, you might be able to find one—here’s some good places to start. Or you could try writing your own, here’s a link that will give you ideas on how to do that.
(As a side note, yours truly tried his hand at terrible modern poetry last week, you can check that out here)