Marianne Moore, in an interview with Donald Hall for the Winter 1961 Paris Review, stated: “I disliked the term ‘poetry’ for any but Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s or Dante’s. I do not now feel quite my original hostility to the word, since it is a convenient, almost unavoidable term for the thing (although hardly for me – my observations, experiments in rhythm, or exercises in composition). What I write, as I said before, could only be called poetry because there is no other category in which to put it.”
Many years after Marianne Moore stated her position, we in the 21st century live in a time of continuous and quickly moving change, which points clearly to innovative forms in the literary arts.
The visual arts have moved in new directions with the intellectual and spiritual changes of modern civilization, and different visual art forms have obviously been created – and so named. It is time for literature to make the leap into the present as the visual arts have.
While I respect the poetry of the past, I think there is reason to state that poetry does not represent the intellectual and spiritual directions of modern civilization.
Tom Fallon
Rumford
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