(The following post appears as a comment on the Monster-ator Mash thread:)Don't you think that there's more to the choice in poetry than truth and status? Personally I would think that those with the higher status would have a greater impact on more people, and it's rare that these people gain their status through truth and muckraking. Is this a conundrum?
Perhaps a level of popularity is necessary for this, and a large group of people with a large audience for an impact to be really made at all.
Perhaps Poets.net will grow into what Foetry was and more, and I think that would be a large step.
That said, I think that poetry today has warped into something totally different from what it ever has been before. These days the number of venues where you can have your poetry published is astonishing. Does this sometimes diminish the quality and effort put into modern poetry?
As a reader of poetry, what would you read, honestly? A book of poems is probably the highest hit, if you really like the author's works. Second is likely the thousands of free electronic websites available, which publish a much higher percentage of the poems which are submitted. But it's free. This creates a subworld of poetry, the poetry posted on a website for collection purposes or status purposes but in the end reach very few people.
What poetry needs, I believe, is an elite magazine which pays decent (therefore creating serious submissions and a wider range of submissions), which can become respected in the poetry world. I've seen poems on discreet websites that are astounding, and have had maybe 100 views if that. A magazine where the articles aren't about the Jorie Grahams and her interviews, but about poetry movements and achievements. A magazine where poems themselves hold higher ground than the kings or peasants who write them.
Maybe with an audience such a magazine could truly turn things around in the right direction, and produce a poem which will be remembered for a few centuries; because I haven't read a famous poem of quality that dates after 1950.
Just throwing fantasies around.
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(Posted with author's permission.)
