{"id":1216,"date":"2009-04-06T23:17:34","date_gmt":"2009-04-07T06:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/2009\/04\/06\/is-poetry-dead-just-in-time-for-national-poetry-month\/"},"modified":"2009-04-06T23:17:26","modified_gmt":"2009-04-07T06:17:26","slug":"is-poetry-dead-just-in-time-for-national-poetry-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/2009\/04\/06\/is-poetry-dead-just-in-time-for-national-poetry-month\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Poetry Dead Just In Time for National Poetry Month?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"max-width: 800px; float: left; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-right: 10px;\" src=\"\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/the-poor-poet.jpg\" \/>Well goodness!&nbsp; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/id\/191012\"><i>Newsweek<\/i><\/a> as seen fit, just as <i>National Poetry Month<\/i> was about to begin, to announce the possibility that poetry has completely and totally kicked the proverbial country bucket.&nbsp; Could this really be?&nbsp; If no one is reading poetry, can it still be a living thing? Apparently, the <i>National Endowment for the Arts<\/i> released a report titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.arts.gov\/research\/readingonrise.pdf\"><i>Reading on the Rise<\/i><\/a>.&nbsp; Sounds optimistic.&nbsp; But they mean fiction.&nbsp; Not poetry.&nbsp; Readership for poetry has declined to its lowest point in 16 years.&nbsp; Everybody is worried.&nbsp; Nobody knows what to do.&nbsp; I suggest doing nothing.&nbsp; Enjoy <i>National Poetry Month<\/i> because it&#8217;s kind of fun to see unpopular poets stand up and try to be famous.&nbsp; Read some popular poems if you haven&#8217;t already and just remember that poetry really is very hard to understand.&nbsp; I think that&#8217;s the key to the whole thing.&nbsp; It&#8217;s a huge pain to read.&nbsp; There&#8217;s all these words sometimes rhyming, sometimes not.&nbsp; I can never tell what the poet is talking about and I get annoyed.&nbsp; It&#8217;s not like <i>Twilight<\/i> at all.&nbsp; Although some really good poems do have vampires in them.<\/p>\n<p>But then, perhaps a week later &#8211; maybe a year.&nbsp; I&#8217;ll be walking along looking for a good plate of hotwings, and I&#8217;ll stop and think to myself, &#8216;Oh right!&nbsp; That&#8217;s what that lady meant by that weird line in her poem.&nbsp; Very cool.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why I like poetry.&nbsp; It hits you when it hits you and that&#8217;s all that matters.<\/p>\n<p>The painting is by poet\/painter, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Carl_Spitzweg\"><i>Carl Spitzweg<\/i><\/a>. It&#8217;s called <i>The Poor Poet<\/i>.&nbsp; It&#8217;s from 1835 and appears to show one of these poets taking the easy way out as he concocts a nearly indecipherable verse.&nbsp; That umbrella is either magically floating or it&#8217;s caught in some serious cobwebs.<\/p>\n<div class=\"zemanta-pixie\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" src=\"\/\/img.zemanta.com\/pixy.gif?x-id=0399061c-19d0-8d96-a4e5-c5075b3d444f\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well goodness!&nbsp; Newsweek as seen fit, just as National Poetry Month was about to begin, to announce the possibility that poetry has completely and totally kicked the proverbial country bucket.&nbsp; Could this really be?&nbsp; If no one is reading poetry, can it still be a living thing? Apparently, the National Endowment for the Arts released [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[200],"class_list":["post-1216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","tag-publishing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1217,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216\/revisions\/1217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/candlelightstories.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}