The founding editors of three of today’s most well-respected online poetry journals had a talk about the future of poetry with “The Review Review.” Here’s the link.

Rob MacDonald of Sixth Finch Journal,  Matt Hart who edits Forklift Ohio Journal and Gale Marie Thompson who runs Jellyfish Magazine spoke about how the masses perceive poetry and how this is affected by the way that poetry is taught. 

This discussion is not new within the very self-conscious poetry world, but the up-and-coming poets that are mentioned by each of the participants makes the article well worth a read. I will be going through the poets mentioned in the upcoming weeks, as their work is sensational.

I have to agree with the participants that if better, more contemporary poems were presented in schools, people would be more interested in poetry on a general basis. For example, the poem that got me hooked was T.S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.”  But, I found this poem inside a thick poetry anthology that was assigned in eleventh grade English Class. While I read about Prufrock’s troubles, my teacher led the class through a heavy, hundred-year-old poem that I am certain none of my classmates recall with fondness.

– Ana Maria Caballero, Zeteo Contributing Writer

The photograph above comes from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) or Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS). These are programs of the National Park Service established for the purpose of documenting historic places. Records consist of measured drawings, archival photographs, and written reports.