Regular reads of this blog know I love the Atlantic.When I saw this article, i made sure to read it. The issue came as high school classes began, so I was busy.
On the whole it is an excellent article, and I like it very much. Whenever I teach poetry (sadly my class at the local two-year school where I adjunct did not make) I look for good poems from poets who come from various backgrounds. While that is hard to do sometimes, I may look for some who were neglected; these are whites from a Western background,
As everything in America appears to be polarized these days, poetry is also. I do not see anything that is pro-Trump, for instance, but there may be some. In poetry the fault line seems to be between slam poetry and the rest of us.
I have been called a "page poet". It was not meant as an insult, but there is a competition. I am not necessarily against slam. After all, I like to read in public and think I am rather good at it. In my educational and ecclesiastical careers, I know about poise, etc. But a lot of slam is just for show, and the poems are not always......poetic.
Putting a poem, even a not very good one, one a meme, or with music and/or a picture, is not something that I like. Those things are forbidden in the one Google poetry group where I am a moderator, and for god reason.
All in all it is good that people are interested more these days in poetry, especially youth. Let's hope they are interested in learning more, and not having it be all about them....
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/chen-chen-aziza-barnes-layli-long-soldier/565781/
