This one reminds me of Robert Service’s Cremation of Sam McGee in its rhyme and how it scans. Whatever you think of these poems, it’s interesting to imagine a time in the US when they could be popular among a wide readership. Poetry seems to have shrunk its audience faster than any other written genre.
My pet theory is that the decline of poetry tracks the advancement of mass media and decline of other types of public/social performance. There were always genres and authors of poetry that were specifically for reading aloud with a group - Robert Service being a good example. It was fun and play. What market there was for this kind of poetry narrowed as mass media expanded, and poetry was relegated to children and the literary.
I kind of agree about rap, and more agree about mass media. More broadly I'd say popular music has eaten poetry. The ballads all got instrumental tracks. Maybe poetry faded because broadcasting became easier. High-bandwidth information beat out low-bandwidth information, because it concentrated more stimuli in a single medium.
I read this one in the manner the Invictus poem is read in the movie, imagining Russel Crowe's voice.
Poetry is one of the activities that has filled the void left by all the social media experiences I quit years ago (hn is the only one I allow myself to occasionally get sucked into, because of the quality of the comments, the moderation, the minimalist non-sensational aesthetic, and the fact that it doesn't take long for me to run out of things to do here before I catch myself getting lost and close the magic portal for awhile- I like it this way). I read poetry to my child, to myself, and I talk about poems with a friend.
Stardines, by Jack Prelutsky, is a gem of crisp rhymes and a quirky theme, and Dr. Seuss remains evergreen. A World Full of Poems: inspiring poems for children, selected by Sylvia M. Vardell, has been fun, too.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 30.1 ms ] threadhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-o...