Let’s face it: Today, the audience of poetry is increasingly dwindling as poetry becomes appealing and understandable only to the poets themselves.
According to the government’s “Survey on National Participation in the Arts,” released last year, Americans’ reading of literature has stayed static, but reading of poetry has sharply declined. In 1992, 18 percent of Americans said they had read or listened to a poem in the last 12 months, but that figure dropped to a mere 7 percent by 2012, the worst decline of any literary genre. In another decade or two, we are looking at virtual oblivion.
Too much poetry today is overly cryptic and out of touch with ordinary readers.
