Does poetry matter--one more time

Wow, you would have thought that there was no more to say on the subject of "is poetry dead"?
But, here's CNN, "Does poetry still matter?," in which Brandon Griggs discusses the new poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera:

Most Americans don't encounter poetry in the course of their daily lives. Most mainstream magazines don't publish it. Chain stores such as Walmart and Target don't carry it. The cult of people who buy books of poetry in the U.S. is almost certainly dwarfed by the 20 million or so viewers who watch a single episode of "Game of Thrones."

Poetry, said poet and associate professor Kyle Dargan of American University in Washington, is "not the kind of thing people are going to run into on their own. It's not 'Jurassic World.' " It's this cultural landscape that greets Juan Felipe Herrera, who this month was appointed the next poet laureate of the United States. As poet laureate, Herrera will be expected to serve as an ambassador for the art form and help boost its visibility through readings, workshops and other events.

...

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• Brandon Griggs,"Does poetry still matter?"

Poetry: still more popular than opera

In the Washington Post wonkblog, Christopher Ingraham asks about the state of poetry:

• "Poetry is going extinct, government data show"

 He points out that asking whether poetry is dying is a tradition that's almost as old as poetry is:
"Is verse a dying technique? How dead is poetry? Who killed poetry? Does anybody care?  Is poetry dead?  Is poetry dead? Is poetry dead?"
 ...but then goes on to look at data from the national Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which points out that reading poetry is less popular then dancing, going to jazz concerts, or knitting... although it is more popular than attending opera.
"Poetry: still more popular than opera"-- say, that's a catchy slogan. Isn't it?

graph from http://fivethirtyeight.com

Death of the Death of Poetry

Donald Hall writes, with some amount of skepticism, about the so-called "Death of Poetry."  Edmund Wilson claimed that verse was a dying technique back  in 1928, and pundits have been declaring poetry is dead for, oh, about the last thousand years.  Yet somehow it keeps on being true that the previous generation of poets are classic-- the same poets whose work caused critics to say that poetry is "dead" a generation ago.
Hall calls these critics out.  Poetry is as alive as ever before; maybe more so.

(Grabbed from)
Death to the Death of Poetry

More than a thousand poetry books appear
in this country each year.

More people write poetry
in this country
     --publish it, hear it,
     and presumably
     read it--
than ever before.

Let us quickly and loudly proclaim
that no poet sells like Stephen King,
that poetry is not as popular
as professional wrestling,
and that fewer people attend poetry reading
in the United States than in Russia. Snore.
More people read poetry now
in the United States than ever did before.

Theory: George and the Incurious Poet

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The death of poetry... again

Serena Agusto-Cox, in The Examiner, and Marc Bain, in an article "The End of Verse?" in Newsweek, discuss a NEA report announcing that the number of American adults reading fiction had increased... and ("as an afterthought") that the number of adults reading poetry had dropped, from 12.1 percent in 2002 to 8.3 percent last year.
...

Even if readership is down, Bain writes, not everyone is concerned. "In fact, popularity is itself a fraught subject in the poetry community.... Today, to call a poem "accessible" is practically an insult, and promotional events like National Poetry Month are derided by many poetry diehards as the reduction of a complex and often deeply private art form to a public spectacle."

John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation, says it's "not necessarily a bad thing" if fewer people read poetry. The goal is to find each poem "its largest intended audience."

...
Barr continues: "Of course, poetry has been supposedly dying now for several generations. In 1934, Edmund Wilson published an essay called "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Fifty-four years later, Joseph Epstein chimed in with "Who Killed Poetry?" and former NEA chairman Gioia gained fame with a 1991 piece titled "Can Poetry Matter?" In answering their titular questions, all three to some degree concluded that poetry's concentration in the hands of specialists and the halls of academia was bad for the art form's health.

"Former poet laureate Hall, who published an essay called "Death to the Death of Poetry" in 1989, has heard it all before. "I'm 80 years old," he says. "[For] 60 years I've been reading about poetry losing its audience."

Despite what national surveys may suggest, and despite rumors of its demise, poetry seems likely to persist, in one form or another."
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"To call a poem 'accessible' is practically an insult"... is that really true? Does accessibility cheapen a poetry? Is popular poetry necessarily bad?