Personally, I don't really care...I love it when people read my poetry but its for me as much as anyone else. Still, I find it somewhat disturbing that people are no longer able to appreciate the beauty of one of the finest arts.

I like some old epic poetry. I read Homer for fun, as well as some other epic poetry.

Poetry always seemed like a math teacher throwing in quantum physics after the first multiplication lesson. To demonstrate, when I was reading through OSC's 'list of works' *, I thought this was poetry.
"I Hunger, Love, and Death
Walking on Water
Short-Lived Creatures
Echo
Grain of the Wood
Of a Private History
This Is the Poem I Made Then
I Go Out the Door
The Man Who Came Back from the Lunar Colony
5 a.m.
Declaration
Myrtle Beach
Elves
Light and Shade
[...]"

Obviously, somewhere along the way, I realized it was not. My point being, it seemed just as 'nonsensical' to me as poetry does.

Anyways, it seems to me that poetry has become the thing for cheesy emails and middle school stuck ups. Kinda insulting. I agree with you Ray, its just not the same anymore. I think the only other people who write poetry are professors and they get all worked up in the rythem and style that they lose the very purpose of the poetry.

So did poetry die with Frost? The last poem I ever heard was one of those idiot chain emails. Makes me want to puke...

Sry...poetry gets me kinda worked up...maybe i need to go write some..

I'm with Silver...I'd never be an English professor but it is poetry that first really made me want to write. Poetry is all about free expression in writing--a thing that is not always possible when writing a novel since you are constrained to plot and characters.

I think it simply takes a little work to appreciate poetry. And a little empathy. What John Mac says is absolutely true. Really try reading some poetry and you will be amazed at how it can move you. And its amazing what it can do to help your writing.

Tolkien, now, I like a lot of Tolkien's poems...it's one of my regrets that there's no "collected poems" volume, and that bits and pieces appear here and there elsewhere in his work. I spent some time studying several of his works done in alliterative verse, trying to figure out how to do it (with little luck).

I also envy Tolkien's ability to drop poems in the body of his narrative, and make it work so well.

I like the way Tolkein uses poetry, though it's not universally popular. Other ways of using poetry to enhance a text have been mentioned. But poetry is a bit hard on the reader, so it has to be really meaningful. And you can't get away with page after page of poetry anymore, epic poetry is a gimmick imitated from the greeks (and other primative cultures) without enough understanding of why they'd done it. Now that we live in a rather post-memnonic culture, we don't have any reason to create new examples. We now prefer memes, which are shorter and less rigid.

For those of you who are interested in the history of Poetry and Speculative Fiction, go here: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2006/20060213/1beatty-rhys0-a.shtml

Me? I like some poetry, but was put off to some extent by the beat generation. Just as I don't care for jazz, modern poetry doesn't "have a beat and you can't dance to it."

For me, poems generally work on two levels. I read a poem (and I tend to gravitate towards narrative poems) and enjoy its story, its language (playing with syntax always gets me excited)... then if I really like it, I'll read it again and start to see how the poet achieves a specific purpose (whether it's dealing with a particular theme or an exploration of an idea or concept).

I shy away from older poetry like the sonnets or Dunne, Frost, Whitman, etc because those are... well... almost too easy? There's nothing new for me to enjoy there unless I want to spend hours contemplating the use of rhyme or structure (which is dull, quite frankly). I also shy away from those who discuss the meaning behind a poem. A poem must stand on its own, it cannot rely on a hidden message to make it great.

I think if you have the time and patience, the more you read poetry--and read it for fun, not trying to get something out of it--the more you can understand it without even trying to. Perhaps because of the training of our English teachers, we approach poetry the way we would a Latin text in need of translation. We assume that what is on the page is simply an undecipherable riddle and thus we spend so much time and energy trying to figure out what the poet is trying to say, that we ignore what's actually on the page. We memorize terms like meter and rhyme and use them to the exclusion of others in our definition of poetry. Then, when faced with a fairly trite and cliche piece of e-mail forward drivel... people say 'Oh! I can read this and like it!' because the "hidden meaning" is so blatant and the structure so recognizable.

What Hel said is really true. However, I would say that there is still alot from Frost and Hughes and other such poets that we can appreciate.

quote:

---

Oh, you have dogs. I take it back
No! Bad dogs!
No bomb there! NO BOMB THERE!

---

The obvious answer is no, the harder answer is why.

Because of the experimentalism inherent in any art, there are published poems that make it seem that you could take anything and call it a poem. In fact there is a type of poem called a 'Found' poem that is simply anything that a poet finds--graffi, newspaper article, etc--that the poet then couches with his/her own writing.

The important thing for anyone who wishes to call something 'bizarre' a poem is to establish his/her own ethos. This is accomplished by publishing poems in well known journals, or any other process by which the individual establishes credibility within the field of Poetry.

As to what poetry is - I guess that's a shifting consensus. I tend to feel that poetry is about paying particular attention to the rhythm and sound of the words. It's as much about what you don't put on the page as what you do.

Tea is
A subtle dancer

Coffee stamps
Joyously through mornings
In big boots

http://www.fictionfactor.com/guests/greetingcard.html

[/pun]

As for new poets that approach something like popularity -- Saul Williams comes to mind, for me. Also Joy Harjo, who's brilliant. Poetry will always have a tiny market, I suppose. Popularity is relative.

I always skip poetry imbedded in a work of fiction. To me it never seems to add to the story.