Most poetry readers want to be time travellers like browsing among anthologies and old favourites, and only occasionally setting foot in the futuristic present. This is because poetry is the richest history we have of our inner life. But the history of the present is still being written, and the excitement of the new can be bewildering. The effort that goes into widening the readership for contemporary poetry are sometimes seems misplaced. The late Adrian Mitchell used to say that “most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people”. But the solution is not to lower the common denominator. The problem with much modern poetry is it plays down what people really like in the arts: mystery and drama. As WB Yeats discovered in his own search for the formula of “popular poetry” in the 20th century, true folk poetry delights “in rhythmical animation, in idiom, in images, in words full of far-off suggestion”. The idea of poetry that is to be popular is the diluted elixir of a later age, which has never sold to the masses. Contemporary means modern or new- if say a drawing is was contemporary 100 years ago. It means that it was modern in its day- but not anymore. Contemporary poetry is most often written in free verse (unrhymed lines). The lines follow the natural rhythms of the language and not the strict five stresses per line in iambic pentameter; written in language that is accessible to the common reader; suggests ideas rather than overtly stating ideas; it is brief in comparison to traditional poetry; it is grounded in the image; invites the reader to complete statements, offer conclusions, and extract meaning. Contemporary poem mean it exists more in the mind of the reader than in accessing the mind of the poet. A sample of a contemporary poem that is brief, unrhymed, suggestive, grounded in imagery and written in common, accessible language. Contemporary poetry focuses on death, love, and family; bland, self-indulgent and overly concerned with the trivial
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
–Wendell Berry
In Africa, the modern and contemporary poetry more than anywhere else has the unique characteristic of closely associating with their national politics. Not a few among their noted and reputed poets were highly eminent revolutionaries who successfully made it to supreme political power. Examples of this are Mozambiq and Zambia that Dr. Augustino Netto made. And Samora Maschel and Joseena Maschel nearly made it.
They say that anyone can make a poem thru what they feel. There is no right and wrong about it.