This month, as the United States continues to safeguard freedom by heroically bombing primary schools in Iran, entertainment headlines have once again been dominated by discourse around hot-button topics, ballet and opera.
Everyone with an internet connection knows what I’m talking about. Liberal arts defector and enemy of culture, Timothée Chalamet, has been sentenced to a hundred years of ritual humiliation by Hollywood’s elite, by offhandedly naming ballet and opera as things “like, no one cares about.”
Personally, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Barely a day goes by that I’m not absentmindedly humming the overture to Don Giovanni while chiffonading herbs, or booking bachelorette party tickets to the latest matinee of Swan Lake. I guess some of us just aren’t as cultured as others 🤷
Admittedly, it was a poor choice of words. You can’t just go around saying things aren’t important to people, without incurring the wrath of people who said things are important to. Not to mention that people in niche artistic disciplines, like madrigal singing and tapestry weaving, tend to be a little touchy.
But aside from the fact that making glib statements is the moral responsibility of the young and outlandishly famous, the ensuing backlash and collective obligation to “rally round” and defend the importance of said disciplines does nothing to halt their decline, and only succeeds in making you sound really fucking annoying.
As someone with a Master's degree in poetry, I know a little something about squandering your life in the pursuit of a culturally obsolete art form. For what it’s worth, I also happen to love the ballet, and derive a simple girlish delight from seeing outlandishly flexible women in spangled leotards. From my perspective, dance is the greatest artistic medium on the planet, and I would abandon blank verse in a heartbeat if I were physically capable of raising a leg above my head.
But one of the most irritating things about working in a nostalgic creative niche is the constant obligation to be a “champion” and a “defender” of said niche, even if that means sticking a pair of sunglasses on its corpse, and wheeling it out at fundraisers and parties, like something out of Weekend at Bernie's.
For almost as long as I’ve been alive, people have been mourning the death of literature. It is an endlessly reheated discussion, stinking up the communal breakroom, like microwaved tuna. As someone who has spent an inordinate amount of time at poetry’s deathbed (“I love you, thank you, I forgive you, please forgive me”), I will admit that it is sad to see something that brings you immense personal joy fade into cultural irrelevance. For those of us who have no children and have gambled our one shot at immortality on a dying art form, it feels like an existential blow. But I can’t see the point in lying about it. You don’t cure a sick patient by talking loudly and angrily about how healthy and robust they are.
It’s not the denial which annoys me. Denial is a healthy and natural part of life, and we should all secretly believe we are never going to die. But one of the reasons I love poetry is (apart from all the exquisite sunsets) the chance to say something wickedly, unpalatably honest. Having to collude in a shared delusion that everything is better than ever seems antithetical to what makes the medium fun to begin with. People don’t get into poetry because of, god forbid, the good vibes and mutually supportive atmosphere. The best poets have always been goggle-eyed loners and emotionally subnormal freaks who luxuriate in their irrelevancy, and no amount of motivational speeches from leading arts organisations will ever change that.
Is this a safe space to admit I prefer watching a new season of Survivor to picking up an award-winning poetry book? Does that make me a cretin and a traitor? Probably. But if you can’t get away with telling unpopular truths as a poet, what’s the point?
Poetry is important, and it is going the way of the horse and plough. How do we fix this? Honestly, it may not be possible. As far as I can see, the only way to resuscitate a niche art form is by being so good at it you accidentally win over a new generation in one fell swoop, like Alysa Liu’s gold medal figure skating performance. But even then, you may just be kicking the can down the road.
What doesn’t work is loudly talking about how important said art form is, unless you want to sound like a Ministry of Health vaccination campaign.
Obviously, this is contentious. Arts funding is on the decline, and if you go around saying things like “poetry doesn’t matter as much as it used to,” it’s bad for the whole ecosystem and gives politicians the excuse they need to divert the entirety of their culture budget to building an overpass and naming it after Katherine Mansfield. But disingenuously pretending the medium you work in has never been in better health does nothing but make you look collectively insane to the prospective non-reading audience you’re allegedly trying to win over. Nobody likes a missionary, not even other missionaries.
The best way to increase interest in the arts is by reducing the barriers between artists and the audience. By subsidising tickets and financially supporting the creation of new work. Public programs like the Sheilah Winn National Shakespeare Festival are great because putting teenagers in fake moustaches and giving them cardboard swords does more for morale than giving them a lecture on Shakespeare. But it's exhausting always having to force literature down people’s throats, as if it were a health tonic. Good literature doesn’t always uplift and instruct. Sometimes it makes you feel worse about life, and that’s valid.
It’s hard to know what to do with these increasingly obsolete art forms. Should we simply allow them to fall into disrepair? Let nature reclaim them, like the wilderness taking over an abandoned service station? I don’t know. Maybe.
The empire of poetry is waning, and the age of video games is upon us. I am sorry for the beauty we have jettisoned along the way. But my honest feeling is that new art will always find a way, even if it doesn’t always arrive in a form we recognise. If poetry is dead, then long live poetry. I no longer want to be a champion for a lost cause. But I will be there, in my black feather boa, to raise a glass at the funeral.
