It is Useless. Why Doesn't It Disappear? Questioning Poetry Today

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course starts with an assumption: poetry is useless. Unlike medicine, it does not cure sick people. Unlike engineering, it does not help us build bridges. Unlike data scientists, it does not help a business sell more. In the past, poetry might have played a very important role in society, but that is definitely not the case today. At bookstores, poetry shelves are the smallest, and poetry books rarely (if ever) make it to a bestseller list. There are many novelists and non-fiction writers who make a living out of their work, but no poet makes a living out of poems (some might make a living out of teaching poetry, but not out of solely writing poems). People who try to read poetry often complain about its difficulty; they feel that they do not understand it. Even poets complain about a lack of audience. It is not an absurdity to ask whether poetry today has any readers beyond poets themselves. However, it still exists: dozens of poetry collections are published each year (including new translations of classical works), poetry readings are organized at universities, bookstores and coffee shops, dozens of prizes are awarded each year to poets, and many articles are published by scholars who specialize in the field. In the Spanish-speaking world, most prestigious literary journals do not pay poets anymore when they publish one of their poems, signaling that the genre is not in good shape when it comes to readership. Heriberto Yépez, an important literary critic and a poet himself, famously wrote at the beginning of this century, "the verse is an anachronistic structure, a historically exhausted structure". Focusing on Hispanic poetry, this course will trace the role played by poetry since its beginnings until the early XXI century, aiming to answer the following questions: How did poetry lose its fundamental role in our societies? What does that mean for literature, culture, and poets themselves? What motivates poets to write even when they know that only a few (at best) will read their work? Will poetry become a field like Logic in mathematics, where only a handful of experts publish and read among themselves? If so, what knowledge is the one possessed by those experts in poetry? Will poetry lose something by becoming a specialized field? Or will poetry just disappear due to a lack of general interest? If so, will society lose something? All these questions will be treated within the context of larger debate on how we assign value today and the distinction between that which is useful and that which is not in our lives.