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"No one reads this stuff anymore," said Director Alice Quinn. "Ironically, everybody is writing it, but the numbers speak for themselves." Annual sales for poetry books have reportedly reached such an abysmal low that "publishers dare not even speak of them".
She described modern poetry as "mostly a lot of young people taking themselves way too seriously and trying to write about it" with more prestigious authors still "mentally, and stylistically, stuck about 140 years in the past."
Believer Magazine, seen as one of the last popular bastions of dusty poetic effluence in modern America, has reportedly ignored the Society's declaration. But Quinn says, "they're secretly praying for their livelihoods in a foxhole that smells like your grandmother's stale attic, but I'm afraid they're outnumbered by an army of DVDs, free Internet pornography, and video games." But one must wonder: isn't that the time to become a believer – when you're forced into a foxhole?
Not according to Chris Hamilton, astute Director of Salt Publishing, who said succinctly about the matter: "You can't sell things to people that they don't want."
The forced market, i.e., the educational system, where participants have no choice but to read and purchase poetry, was seen by the Poetry Society, and by Quinn, as one of the last strongholds for the craft. But that has changed with the proliferation of comic books. Shakespeare can now be read in graphic novel format, by publishers like SparkNotes. "Students no longer have to put up with the pain and punishment of figuring out arcane and archaic phraseology. It's really quite sad," Quinn said.
Archaic poetry has long been seen by many professors as a necessary form of punishment against barely literate and lower class readers. The ones who could manage to battle their way through the linguistic minefields of Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare proved themselves sufficiently intellectual to move up the ladder of educational success – all to face even more agonizing tests. And the ones who fell by the wayside knew their lot in life. But that never-ending cycle of suffering seems as if it is now coming to a close.
Professors across the nation have canceled classes and packed up their bags to return to their homes after the Society's announcement. Deans from hundreds of universities, both public and private, have canceled funding for their humanities departments. One professor said, "Writing papers about poetry no one's heard of for academic journals that no one reads was my livelihood. I don't know what I am going to do now."
Some have said that poetry has been lost to a "text message generation of lols and omgs," and to a large degree that may be true, but Quinn described poetry's end as "mostly suicidal," saying that "the number of people who thought that it had to be stuffy, pretentious, emotional, or nonsensical basically put a gun to its head. The niche just kept getting smaller and smaller as writers alienated their only audience: other poetry writers. Now it's all over."
But poetry didn't go out without a fight at least, says Quinn. The Society's last ditch efforts to save the idiom included an expensive, ten million dollar, privately funded, online campaign that used "link bait," i.e., fraudulent link titles, and "pictures of sexy women," all designed to fool users into clicking through to read poetry on the Society's website. The results? A total of four clicks. It was clear that the campaign was a failure and that the fate of poetry was sealed.
Asked what her plans were in a post poetry world, Quinn said, "I'll go into insurance, probably."
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