But I actually liked parts of this one. It's pretty obvious to me that it's impossible for a poem to get Grecian Urn famous these days. It's also likely that certain classic poems wouldn't see the light of day in the modern paradigm of journals and creative writing departments and so on.
I'm not really sure how poems got famous in the past -- if Beckett on Johnson is anything to go by, poems were published and everyone read them to seem cultured, and then they got talked about at dinner parties, and then, sometimes, trickled down to the attention of those who might actually appreciate the beauty. These days the vast majority of poems die in the unenviable womb of the low-hundreds circulation poetry mag, or the blog read by mom, dad and your old teacher.
So it's all weird.
I like to write poetry and have competed in poetry slams but I'll be honest. I have never heard of Christian Wiman before this article. I have heard of poetry the magazine but not of its editor itself. Hell, I don't even remember if I have ever passed by one of Wiman's books at a Barnes and Noble or an independent book store.
Getting poetry truly out there is a weird thing indeed. I remember a friend from the poetry slam scene saying, "A lot of people that are good at slam think they're famous sometimes but they are really not. They are only poetry famous. If you took them to a bunch of random people on the street, no one would know who they are."
In these modern times, there is just so much information out there that's it hard to process. Things get lost in the shuffle. The main question though I guess is how does poetry breakout to the masses? So many poetry scenes are different from one another. I hang out with people in a slam scene and other people from an open mic scene that aren't slammers and it's totally different what their taste in poetry is but one thing they have in common is I'm not too sure they would to be keen of the MFA scene where a classical style is appreciated. I mean there are some people that do enjoy classics but there are a lot of others that are looking for something gritty or something that tries to explain what's going on with racial relations in America or something like that.