Newsweek, or at least Bruce Wexler at Newsweek, says poetry is dead and nobody cares: "It is difficult to imagine a world without movies, plays, novels and music, but a world without poems doesn't have to be imagined." He lives in it. "Poetry," he says, "is designed for an era when people valued the written word and had the time and inclination to possess it in its highest form," but people no longer have "the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren't willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly. They want narrative-driven forms, stand-alone art that doesn't require an understanding of the larger context."
Well, gag me with a spoon. If you have to read a poem 20 times before you understand its basic movement, either you or the poem is stupid—and odds are it's the poem. Even Pound, the Father of Obscurity, said poetry should be at least as well written as prose. That's not to say you won't find new understanding the 20th time you read a poem, but good poetry gives immediate sensual pleasure, however dark or subtle or complicated it turns out to be.
There's another problem: Wexler doesn't seem to allow anything but greatness onto Parnassus's slope. A poem which doesn't induce ecstatic union with the something or other simply won't do, and so he deprives himself of a good part of the joy of reading poems. Think of that same attitude applied to reading novels or watching movies. How dreary to have nothing but Tolstoy and Woolf, or only Bergman and Kurosawa. Hooray for minor poetry!
But it's just as bad to expect poetry to express "disdain for symbol, for metaphor, for all the Sophomore-English-Class ways poems mean," as Slate's Dan Chiasson described Frank O'Hara's poetry last week. Unfortunately, he meant it as praise. I'm quite certain O'Hara was a remarkable person to know. His poetry is utterly unremarkable. His two best known poems can be read here and here. "The Day Lady Died" ends well; "Why I Am Not A Painter" is just embarrassing.
Somewhere between those two attitudes it's possible to honor craft and innovation, intelligence and feeling, the sublime and the silly.
8:12:49 PM 
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