Comment by e-dt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by e-dt | Hacker News Reader

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Why do we neglect poetry, anyway? After Mother Goose there's a great lacuna in poetic education up until, I suppose, a possible Literature degree. In school we study and restudy novels and Shakespeare-as-a-novel, which (despite the method of teaching) sets up students to enjoy novels. But we study poetry not at all, or only rarely. (Let alone long-form poetry!) And certainly there's a market for poetry: after all, rap is poetry, and the best examples of rap are up there with the greats.

I need to amend my previous question, actually. Both poetry and prose have fairly popular public outlets in the form of the novel and rap. (Of course rap is a specific form of poetry, but the popular novel tends to take a stereotyped form as well: the romance, the detective story, formerly the pulp adventure...) The best examples of popular novels and rap ascend to the status of high art (really the best type of high art, the high art that is also low art.) But, crucially, a novel reader whose interest is piqued by very good popular novels can fairly seamlessly transition into reading literary fiction, as it shares in large part the form and characteristics of the novel. The rap listener awed by, e.g. Kendrick Lamar's lyricism, has no such path to literary poetry. How do we expect poetry to thrive in these conditions?

And that's not even getting into the historical conditions which mean many people dismiss rap music.

That's really interesting. In Germany poetry is handled differently. In the earlier years of what would be high-school there are poets like Jandel[0] and Morgenstern[1] in the curriculum who wrote a lot of funny, nonsensical poems playing with language a lot. Later (if you do schooling aimed at getting you to university) there is a lot of in-depth reading of romantic[2]as well as clacissist (think the latet works of Goethe and Schiller) poetry. Also, at least in my Latin classes, we also read Ovid, as well as Shakespeare's sonnets. These poems are analysed regarding their contents, as well as more formally concerning meter etc. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Jandl [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Morgenstern [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism

I'm of two minds about the gymnasium system. On the one hand, as you say, it seems to provide a better, more well-rounded education than the public school system of at least my native Australia. But on the other hand, I am constitutionally incapable of endorsing any kind of streamed education system, despite (or in actual fact because of) having attended a highly selective school myself. My gut reaction, in all my idealism, is that the quality and level of education of a selective school should be available for everyone. Of course there are myriad obstacles, etc. etc. (I won't dwell on them because it depresses me.)

But surely public education can be a whole lot better even for the broad masses of the population: e.g. apparently the Soviet maths curriculum (for which the textbooks are freely available online, interesting to look at) was highly advanced when compared to the e.g. Australian one (which is more advanced than the American one), and yet the two systems had similar rates of attainment within each curriculum. More personally, it's astonishing to me the rates at which even highly educated Americans speak of calculus only in hushed and awed voices as if it's some kind of arcane art, and equally it was astonishing to me during high school to see that my friends (who, not to brag, I do not believe are significantly more intelligent than me) were so incredibly advanced in mathematics compared to me, simply because of their private tuition.

To get back on topic, how is the status of poetry in German culture? Is it more mainstream, do you think, than in English-speaking culture? More popular?

(And finally, to add another parenthetical to an already bloated and unedited post, I may as well qualify my assertions in my original comment: Poetry is not completely absent during high school education. I remember there was one 4-weekish unit on slam poetry, though to my recollection it consisted mostly of memorising a litany of 'poetic techniques'. [Also, to be fair, the predominant method in teaching prose.] And of course there is, which should perhaps not really count, the perennial acrostic - which I suspect was the only form of poetry they thought children could write.)

I don't have a similarly elegant answer to your query, but it made me pause and consider why I dislike poetry and in lesser way, rap music.

I dislike poetry (and rap) because it is too introspective, too personal, too self centred and painting a picture of the author's mindset that is lost on someone else. Other art forms try to elicit an emotion to the readers or viewers. They're telling a story, presenting an idea for someone else's eyes. Feels to me like no one can appreciate the poet's art and depth more than its author. As such, there is no bad poetry, which is why it's that easy to have robots convince us that random words are instead contents of a particularly troubled mind.

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