The marketplace of ideas

...or is poetry dead?

I think becoming involved in online writing communities has reminded me why I write. It's about communication and dialogue. I like becoming engaged in conversation with people who can articulate their ideas intelligently.

Perhaps that's part of why I largely abandoned poetry after graduate school. When you're pursuing a craft where most of your feedback consists of rejection slips, it's hard to remain engaged. I may have disengaged a little too easily, as I confess I didn't spend much time submitting work after grad school. Perhaps I'm a little too much about instant gratification for poetry. Or perhaps I got tired of reading published poets whose primary goal seemed to be obscuring their meaning.

That doesn't mean I think poetry should be easy, or that mine necessarily is. But it should communicate.

Lately I've been fortunate enough to stumble upon a number of writers doing just that on thisisby.us, and there are even some poets among them. Perhaps the craft isn't dead after all.