Is American Poetry at a Dead End?

That's the question recently posed to poets by the Huffington Post.

From the piece...

Campbell McGrath

American poetry, on the contrary, is neither dead nor at a dead-end. There may not be any great revolutionary movement afoot, but there is much ardent hewing of lumber in the forests of Poetry Land. Many of those trees end up as sawdust, sure, but there's some good carpentry and furniture making as well--there are plenty of roads through the yellow wood. I'd assert that liveliness reigns in Poetry Land. I attended my very first AWP Convention last year, and was amazed at the energy on display in the vast warehouse full of poetry journals and webzines and other innovative publishers that jammed the convention center in Denver. Of course, much of that publishing takes place online nowadays, but those of us raised on books are just going to have to get used to the virtual transition taking place. When it comes to the economics of online publishing, poets are way ahead of the curve, having not been paid for our writing these last several centuries. To all those prose writers and journalists bemoaning their lost paychecks I say, welcome to Poetry Land, Comrades!

Finally, I'll risk restating the obvious by venturing that there's only one useful piece of advice for any young writer: write. Pay no attention to the state of American poetry, the death of the book, the legacy of Modernism, the bedbugs in your cheap apartment: ignore as much as you possibly can get away with and write. Resist the careerist temptations of PoBiz. Stay home and write a poem. There is no particular place to get to in Poetry Land, anyway. The point of the journey is the journey itself, the process of writing poetry, which hopefully you consider enriching and indispensable. If not, spare yourself a lot of grief. Go back to that fork in the yellow woods, watch out for ATVs driven by gun-toting meth-heads, and pick another road.