Poetry and me

I have been besotted with poetry since I was a child and regret that so many people consider it effete, middle-class and inaccessible as much as I regret the modern antidote to that - the rant poetry and the machine gun delivery of those desperate to keep an audience's attention span by blasting them with high speed rhetoric.
The result has been that we all lose,
The accepted wisdom is that we can either have the reverence and polite applause of Snape Maltings and the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, or the glass breaking irreverence of a night at an open mic where the audience waits for the music to begin.
Poets are now the vicars of the age and pop-stars have not only become all the rage but often falsely promoted to the dizzy intellectual heights of poets for their ballads by those desperate to find hidden depths in the lyrics.
The sadness of that is that masters of language and meaning like Eliot, and Yeats, and Lowell and Donne, and Blake and many others are devalued and poetry is skipped over because it takes a bit of time.
To get school-boys to read poetry in the age of the faux adult is almost impossible, as thinking and feeling are out of fashion.
Well I reject that and I've had enough of it.
In a technologically enlightened time when my children tell me that it is as good as it ever got I cannot help thinking it's bloody not we are losing the ability to think and consider.
Rather than being a triumphal parade of the age of reason, the information age appears to me to to be the victory of the marketeers, the sound bite and a fast thought culture.
A culture that despite warnings, is walking open-eyed into a world where every impulse is gauged on the internet and where we are ruthlessly driven to conform in a world where we are monitored in a way that would have given George Orwell nightmares that he would not have dared write into '1984'.
We are now as Eliot warned in 'The Four Quartets' permanently, "distracted, from distraction, by distraction," and it's only going to get worse.
But what would l know about this?
Oddly, quite a lot.
I have written about technology for national newspapers for over 25 years and have watched with alarm the process pick up speed and I have come to the conclusion that in the 21st century - the rich will live really and the poor will live virtually and, that riches will not be related to the money in your bank account but the amount of art in your soul.
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Comments from a Crag

Big, bang, boom
Just pulsing and pumping
All the world's humping.
All of that groaning
They're not really moaning.
For now love's a boom and bust industry,
Expansion and contraction the name of the game.
Depressions are natural and sex is love free
And perish the thought, we all do it the same.
It's quick profit turnover
For the girl on the street.
Hands up the pullover
And business from your seat.
And love? Love's out of fashion
Sex sells, so sell sex.
But wait, wait we can use passion
The adman collects.
But still, I can't help glancing,
You're so entrancing,
Wish -
We were dancing.