Writing Poetry In a Digital World
By Sarah Hope
Poets are Poetry’s worst enemy.
The genre itself has waned throughout the years but especially so as we further delve into the digital age. You will find that poetry is fluid, flexible and based on writing styles or reader’s preference. All which is part of the appeal. Anyone can write poetry. Long, short- I’ve seen poems with two sentences and some with fifty. While this seems great the issue lies within three parts of this: the poets to readers ratio, the way poets interact with each other and the lack of respect in the connotation of poetry.
Although the digital era paved more roads to success for niche businesses, communities and celebrities. They also closed a couple off for the publishing industry. While I agree that the modernized version of art is inclusive to everyone, the accessibility is overshadowed by the demanding amount of artists without the reader base to keep up with them. Publishing companies are already dwindling with book stores soon to become a dying breed. Meaning they accept less and less authors every year. Without more people showing interest in reading poetry, the genre is soon to fall through the cracks. Publishing a poetry book is already difficult which is why the general recommendation is to self-publish. A positive door opened by the internet. But only if you have readers. While you are able to market online, there is not as large of a community looking for poets on the rise. So again, in the same place that most poets find themselves in- you can create but to what audience?
You would figure that maybe the audience would be other poets. But poets all have their own style. And a preference for writing, specifically their own. Meaning you won’t find a lot of poets who are creating also reading. So while the digitized art world is full of new opportunities, there is no real way to capitalize on this unless artists support other artists. This seems easy enough but the flexible nature of poetry leaves too much to be found. People searching for meaningful prose may find it hard to discover the artist who makes them want to read more of their work. Not to mention the amount of platforms dedicated to spreading art might actually leave a scarcer fanbase. The writers that stay on one app have to hope the amount of people who use that app are also seeking out what they wrote. This might be beneficial for books, short stories or articles but not for poetry. Poetry is already struggling with the lower demand, oversupply and the multiple apps to post create even more divide. How can we expect a reliable audience if the audience is scattered throughout different social medias? This leaves it up to artists to become a bigger part of the viewership in order to show there is one at all.
Poetry itself is shied away from with labels that are seemingly outdated. The new generation of poetry in the digital age is a step away from those with new ways to write emerging daily. Not to mention songwriters, often compared to poets, have become a way for the genre to evolve through music. There is an argument that’s made to say songwriters are not poets. would disagree and offer that the connotation of the word seems pretentious, boring and overly confusing which keeps people from wanting to interchange the two. This lacks nuance because the genre exists in so many forms leaving too much undiscovered to say boldly. This contributes to the lack of audience you see with not many people wanting to read poetry under the title of poetry.
While the takeover of online platforms has helped out several industries, poetry is not high among the list. The genre has so many artists, it shoots itself in the foot. While we have millions of poems being written every day, we don’t have the same amount of readers eager to seek it out. Support from artists to other artists seems the best way forward for succeeding in the genre while transitioning into the digital era of art.
