In today’s short-form world, the content flooding our feeds seems to focus on “hooks” and “accessibility.”
I think poet Mark Strand got this right, decades before the emergence of TikTok or Instagram. “If you try too hard to be immediately comprehensible to your audience, if you give too much to the moment, you’re also giving too much to the status quo. The poet’s obligation isn’t to his audience, primarily, but to the language… Why can’t we be a little more patient with poetry?”
He continued, “you have to be willing to meet it halfway — because it won’t go any further than that if it’s any good. A poem has its dignity, after all.”
This applies to all art.
