What Happened to Poetry?

Poetry used to be a form of art to express one’s love or appreciation to one another, to write about one’s feelings, or even what one is going through. We see this often with Shakespeare, which is why there’s a whole poetry style named after him, and in poets like Emily Dickinson, who had a punctuation mark named after her. We see poetry move into a more progressive realm during the Black Art Movement. Artists like Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Langston Hughes used poetry to expose their oppression and mistreatment during this time period. This is when literature and poetry were at its peak. We then get poets like Maya Angelou and Dr. Seuss which everyone knows about and is often read by kids and teenagers, but coming into the year 2020 art on paper or in literature seems to not be globalized like other art mediums. 

Something that I found might be the root of the reason is that Slam Poetry has become popularized and going to poetry slams are now the go-to. People like to hear poets speak their art, and honestly, some poetry is meant to be spoken while others are meant to be read. I would call this “expanding” rather than erasure because art on paper is still studied in classes and read by free will. 

I’ve also noticed that a lot of poets become popularized when they pass away or when decades go by. Something that I think would help that is to dabble in both Spoken Word poetry and poetry on paper. Draw attention from people by showing how great of a performer you are by using your own spoken word poetry and provide your social media (very important) so they can look at your other pieces of poetry on paper. This might take a lot of confidence and whatever might help to calm your nerves (we don’t judge here) but I found that these are the most helpful in assimilating in this new expansion and popularization of poetry.