Poetry Is Everywhere

In April 2015, The Washington Post published an article that combined insult, injury, and statistics with a ruthless efficiency. Headlined “Poetry Is Going Extinct, Government Data Show,” the piece—published (insult! injury!) at the height of National Poetry Month—was based on the most recent results of the survey that the National Endowment for the Arts conducts every five years as part of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey: an attempt to understand, through numbers, Americans’ relationship to the art form that represents, as Wallace Stevens once put it, “the renovation of experience.”

The survey’s top-line tidings, if you care about poetry as an art form, were as dire as the plummet-lined graphics the created to accompany the story. The survey, citing data gathered in 2012: “Since 2002, the share of poetry-readers has contracted by 45 percent—resulting, summing it up: “Over the past 20 years, the downward trend is nearly perfectly linear—and doesn’t show signs of abating.”