Trouble? Double?
Poetry’s death has been robustly forecasted,
It’s reading a downward straight line;
Too hard to teach and too hard to learn,
No wonder it’s in decline!
But hold on a minute, what’s that you say,
The youth are fixing that trouble!
Their writing and reading of all forms of poetry,
Over previous years is now double!
© Forrest W. Heaton October 2018
Poetry reading by young people has doubled since 2012!
Poetry reading by young people has doubled since 2012!
No, you’re not seeing double. There is a surprising societal change underway in the increase of the reading and writing of poetry. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has just reported:
- “The share of adults reading poetry grew by an astounding 76 percent between 2012 and 2017 . . . . Some 28 million adults reported reading poetry in 2017.”
- “The results are even more dramatic for young people. The percentage of poetry readers age 18-24 doubled during that period.”
Mary & I would like our blog to take full credit for this dramatic change; however, we’ve learned we need to share the credit with the internet. It turns out that many examining these trends credit social media and the internet in drawing more people in: 1) reading the poetry of others and, 2) for the first time in their lives, expressing themselves thru writing poems they share either by name or anonymously online. Just three years ago the Washington Post reported NEA data in an Apr15 article “Poetry Is Going Extinct, Government Data Show”: “Since 2002, the share of poetry-readers has contracted by 45 percent—resulting in the steepest decline in participation in any literary genre.” Thus, the 2012 to 2017 NEA data is a fascinating development!
High school senior Vanessa Tahay recites a poem of hers during a public recital at Pershing Square in Los Angeles on May 23, 2017. Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times/TNS
When you start to look, you will begin to find astonishing examples of this writing/reading explosion by young people. For example, our guess is most people born before, say, 1990 have never heard of Wattpad. However, if younger, there’s a good chance they at least know what Wattpad is if not having participated. Wattpad is an online community claiming an audience of 65 million users enabling writers/readers to publish their writing including poetry and share their opinions with fellow writers/readers. For the fun of it, take a look at other examples by entering into your search engine “12 Best Poetry Websites for Kids – Interactives and Collections”, or “6 Great Websites for Teen Writers.” More than likely your reaction will be similar to ours—we had no idea all of this was/is happening!