MPR’s Doug Hamilton speaks with local English Professor and poet Michael Dennis Brown on the state of modern love poetry today. Brown speaks on poetry’s decreasing popularity in comparison to other forms of media and expression. He also talks about his expectations for the future of poetry and how he hopes it evolves and grows with the world’s changes.
[MUSIC PLAYING] MICHAEL DENNIS BROWN: Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove.
SPEAKER 2: The poetry is from Shakespeare. The reading is from a Twin Cities poet, University of Minnesota English Professor Michael Dennis Brown. Despite the annual interest in poetry around Valentine's day, Brown says verse is losing popularity as a form of artistic expression.
MICHAEL DENNIS BROWN: The poetry audience has dwindled, certainly since Shakespeare's time. Poetry has lost out a great deal to song, especially since popular song became so literate, going back, I don't know, 20 or more years. Poetry has lost out to song, no question. I think poetry has also lost out to the novel. And poetry has lost out to nonfiction.
There is a devoted audience for poetry. And I think there are times when people go to poetry uniquely. Because in poetry, there can be a distillation and a sensual sense of something that only poetry can provide. But I wouldn't want to claim that poetry's audience was wider than it used to be. I think it's smaller. Competition is tougher and a lot louder.
SPEAKER 2: Well, on a day like today, a lot of people do turn to poetry, however, usually, perhaps a hackneyed verse or two on a simple card. Is there a, do you think, a realistic potential that there might be new popular poets?
MICHAEL DENNIS BROWN: I have to think so. I have to think that poetry is evolving and that we can find new ways to say perhaps old things. Poets, I think Czeslaw Milosz said, poets have to live on hope, conscious or unconscious. When people say to a poet, what's your favorite poem? You often end up saying, well, my next one. Because you hope that next time, you'll get it right. So my hope is that poetry will evolve and grow as the world is doing. And we'll find ways to express the complexities of love in as accessible a way as possible.
SPEAKER 2: One final question, addressing, again, that question of love. What do you think, in your mind, is the most romantic image to society, to popular society?
MICHAEL DENNIS BROWN: Oh, I suppose it has to be something floral. It has to be something to do with the rose, something to do with something multiple which unfolds and reveals itself. The rose is a great symbol, through poetry, of love. And I don't think it's really lost its fragrance.
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