if only to be contrarian, i would say that I do find this poetic, even in its single line form as you recreated it. now, that gets into an argument of what is poetic and what is poetry and where do the two intersect, but I don't think it's unfair to say that the feeling you get from reading something that is poetic and the feeling you get from reading poetry is similar, if not the same.
Now argue that I need to find it poetic. I give two shits what you find poetic. However, the act of teaching poetry means defining what is or isn't poetic, assigning grades to those opinions, and stifling dissent against the prevailing view of what is or isn't poetic. Here, I'll say something controversial: poetry is a vestigial remnant of an era of illiteracy where the majority of the public was incapable of creating or consuming the written word, so words written with particular artistry were elevated to a new art form through their sheer rarity.
I don't think we have to find the same things poetic I think you're railing less against poetry and more against the prevailing culture of how we teach art. I don't disagree with you either, that what academics see as "good" versus what is often actually good (or perceived as good by modern taste) can be quite different, or that academics can be unnecessarily exclusive. Spoiler alert, they are, because most academics can't survive without an air of exclusivity. Universities can be gross about exclusivity and I say this as someone who's got two degrees and is heading back for another diploma. This is actually a decent explanation of the beginning of written poetry. I totally agree. We went on to do other things with poetry after this, but this is exactly where it came from. Or even to go further, Poetry came from when we used rhythm and rhyming to remember long stories, such as the Sagas, or Beowulf, or the works of Homer, or the Epic of Gilgamesh. But how did we decide what was good enough to write down? the words that were written with, as you say " particular artistry". It's not like Beowulf was the only story being told, but it was one of the ones that someone thought was good enough to write down, and the one that someone thought was good enough to save from a fire, and the one that people thought was good enough to keep preserved for almost 1000 years.poetry is a vestigial remnant of an era of illiteracy where the majority of the public was incapable of creating or consuming the written word, so words written with particular artistry were elevated to a new art form through their sheer rarity
Absolutely. But I also think that poetry, more than any other art form, is inextricably intertwined with that prevailing culture. Poetry, for practical purposes, has escaped to song lyrics and children's books. Poetry, for academic purposes, has disappeared up its own asshole. So if you want to enjoy poetry, listen to song lyrics and read children's books. But if you want to learn about poetry, enjoy being up some academic's asshole because even if you type "modern sonnet" into Google you get Edna St. Vincent Millay and if you want to read the "pushcart nominated" poetry of the guy who started this whole dumpster fire with his Instagram slagging you get love but you'll know when you feel it because it will be forever Poetry used to be this shit. Now? We're giving awards to Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey and slagging on kids who can't tell the difference between faux intellectualism and parody faux intellectualism. You know what? The spiritual successors of Coleridge aren't Instagram fuckhead, they're goddamn Public Enemy: And now, Ludacris freestyles a Llama Llama book.I think you're railing less against poetry and more against the prevailing culture of how we teach art.
you can't find
My feeling on modern poetry is that it becomes modern pedantry. It's 10% about the content and 90% about the qualifications of the content. It seems, more and more, it's a way for intellectuals to practice debating without discussing anything of meaning.
Most poetry ever written probably follows that percentage, and that definition. I'm going to make what might be a bold statement here: Most art is garbage, even the educated stuff (sometimes especially the educated stuff). Take classical music for an example (as it's my main focus). There are thousands of composers writing music right now. Maybe one of them will be remembered in 100 years. Even of the people we think of "Great 20th century composers", Copland, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Gershwin, Shoenberg, Ellington, and others, perhaps two or three will be remembered and celebrated in the way that we remember and celebrate people like Bach and Mozart. Even then, not everything the "Masters" wrote was great- Beethoven's "Wellington's Victory" has generally been seen as awful from the moment it premiered. You have to run under the assumption that most of the art you will ever see created in your lifetime with be crap, and even the stuff that will be good will be forgotten, just like every other age. Museums can make this deceptive, showcasing the greatest art from 500 years and more, but it's not that those people didn't have to deal with crap. It's that the crap has dried up and blown away, leaving (mostly) the good stuff. So what i'm saying is that your statement is correct, but it is also correct for every other era of poetry, and every other kind of art.
The problem is that academics get to define what is crap and what isn't, and force that narrative. John Gardner blew several chapters arguing that people teach what is easy to demonstrate, not what is good, the end result being that pedantry defines a genre, not quality. And, the longer someone's been dead the less controversy there is. I had an English teacher argue that James Fenimore Cooper was art because millions of people loved his books but Stephen King was not because. And then she changed the subject. The fact that we're forced to choke down Leatherstocking bullshit purely because everyone read it back then is like arguing kids 200 years from now are gonna have to read goddamn Twilight because it was on every supermarket shelf, while arguing no one should read Twilight now because Stephanie Meyer isn't a hundred years dead. Most art is garbage. But "experts" get to elevate their garbage choices and lord their expertise over the rest of us. And we hate you for it.