As a friend once told me, “You are what you eat.” This is to say if you spend enough time reading Blake, you then move on to Hopkins, Tennyson, Frost, Cummings, Yeats and the rest. Essentially you turn yourself into a mini Robin Williams, waltzing around campus recruiting your friends to revolutionize their free time by forming a Dead Poet’s Society in the underground tunnels (If this is you, please do not force anyone to refer to you as “oh captain, my captain.”)
As a generation, we still read the poets of centuries past with reverence and respect. But where are our generation’s poets?
Earlier this year, The Washington Post published an article entitled “Is Poetry Dead?”
Post writer Alexandra Petri explained, “All literature used to be poetry. But then fiction splintered off. Then the sort of tale you sung could be recorded and the words did not have to spend any time outside the company of their music if they did not want to.”
The emotions poetry used to evoke —- the welling up in your throat almost forcing tears to flow from your eyes- —  seem to find its muse in a new form. Those tears no longer fall reading the newly released ‘Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry’ on the shelves of a local Barnes & Noble. The tears fall from hearing an artist sing out his soul.
“An older man stands in a buffet line, He is smiling and holding out his plate, And the further he looks back into his timeline, His server asks him, Have you figured out yet, what it is you want? I want a little bit of everything, The biscuits and the beans, Whatever helps me to forget about. The things that brought me to my knees, So pile on those mashed potatoes, And an extra chicken wing, I’m having a little bit of everything.”
Dawes’s “A Little Bit of Everything” pulls metaphors, life experiences and rhyme to illustrate the ills of daily life in a single stanza. Dawes effortlessly sums up the grand theme of this man’s life in his mundane entree decision. I picture years down the road, a class of students sitting in hover craft desks on Wall-E’s spaceship reading Dawes and a professor guiding his class through an interpretation of 21st century life.
A moment spent reading Yeats’s “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” I couldn’t help but hear a small fly, by the name of Scott Avett, buzzing in my ear singing ” The Ballad of Love and Hate.” The allusions transcending across the years to illustrate the point poetry is not dead. Poetry has merely inhabited a new medium.
Petri said of our generation’s inclination to tell stories through music, “If it is complete on the page, it makes a shoddy lyric. But there is still wonderful music to be found in those words. If we really want to read it, it is everywhere. Poetry, taken back to its roots, is just the process of making – and making you listen.”
When our generation is gone, I propose it will be more than poetry that lives on. The music will tell our stories. Just as Bob Dylan’s lyrics stand as a time capsule for the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s, the artists of the 21st century will position themselves as MP3 statues of a generation gone by.
Poetry is not dead, in the same way books are not dead. Poetry, like books, has a new comrade to share its audience. Poetry shares an audience with lyrics, the same way books divide their market with e-readers. Poetry and music have the innate ability to co-exist, as they are derived from the same origin- —  the written word. Music is essentially, a new medium for an old message.