The glamourous head shots. The witty banter pre-reading. The endless navel gazing post-reading over a few dozen cocktails. The face painted fans screaming at the top of their collective lungs. The air horns. The foam fingers. The sold-out merch tables. The cab ride hook ups. No it’s not frosh week, it’s WORLD POETRY MONTH!

Through the media lens poetry hunks and heroines are seen as national treasures who live out their important cultural hours in some netherworld in which these humble, quasi-academic bohemians-turned-celebrities burble glamour, fortune, eroticism and fame. Don’t you know? It’s poetry month! Tell your accountant. Hairdresser. Phys-ed teacher. Math tutor. Tell Jack Layton and Olivia Chow.

For an entire month (though somehow I feel like this happens every few weeks) poets are endlessly paraded out on half-known and well-known blogs and discussion panels, college and national radio shows and cattled to readings series like it was the end of the genre. What is the motivation? This hyperbolic blast of focus is a misguided attempt to create a frenzy for a business that is simply irreversibly marginalized.

The attempt to make mainstream or even explain to the average, exhausted 9 to 5er what poetry is, let alone expect them to show up to a bar and listen to poets read all month is astounding and laughable.

Maybe if we showed up at the staff room all month and offered to read them some poems, or walked them home from the bus stop slowly, like a goldfish in a new bowl, they’d get used to us. But thrusting the word poetry around is, based on my ongoing case study, falling on deaf ears.

While it would be amazing if two million Canadians followed rob mclennan’s every poetry-mention day-in, day-out this month on his beloved blog, www.robmclennan.blogspot.com poetry month is, like it or not, for the poets, by the poets and not a mutual understanding between this fantasy fan base that exists in paper and grant applications. This intestinal fortitude of noble efforts in which poetry-related press releases, missives, gimmicks and other astronaut-like accolades are tossed into the hype salad, only to see well, lack-luster reality-based results.

In a recent article on the CBC website in regard to poetry’s non-existent fever in which they site BookNet Canada figures, “close to 73,000 poetry books were sold in 2010, down 5 per cent from the previous year. But in that period, book sales decreased a similar amount across the board, so it’s hard to say whether this is simply part of a general trend. Perhaps more telling is the fact that poetry books make up only 0.12 per cent of total market sales.”

Poet Michael Lista, who garnered some reTweets and Likes and OMG’s in recent weeks with his Anakin Skywalker-like rant in The National Post about how the country should shed a good chunk of its literary magazines (younglings or otherwise) and create some newer, way better ones, seemed disappointed more people weren’t “getting” the concept behind what is essentially a month-long poetry reading.

“The people who stand to lose by not reading poetry are the people who don’t [read poetry],” Lista said. “I think all poets would love to have a broader audience [...] the sort of audience that goes to see the next Stephen Spielberg movie — we’ll never have an audience like that, nor do we need to have to aspire to one.”

To compare poetry-going and movie-going public is a clear-cut confession that no one in this country truly has a clue how to promote our national literary sport.

Just take a gander on Twitter, Facebook and other forms of CanLit torture, and you see that the only ones truly enthused or critical (read: aware) of poetry month are those accused or suspected of being poets or poetry publishers. And what’s most troubling about the online dialogue that’s ensued this month is the degree to which poetry defenders seek to protect and uphold the genre’s inferiority complex.

Of course, herein lies the paradox. Given culture’s obsession with visuals (films, clothing, face recognition, driving) poetry marks one of the only cultural outlets that is virtually free, wherein Joe the Plumber and his family can be empowered culturally for thirty minutes on any night of the month in April, watch cocky, charming, versed-up poets grope innuendo, emotionalism, and the now industry standard self-deprecation-speak. (My Aunt was at a reading recently and asked me why professional actors didn’t do the readings for poets, and why the hell they had to be so self-defeating on stage.)

If poets are, (not all but some) saying there is no value in poetry, even in joke, online or on stage, then what does that tell future or current audiences?

It makes sense, then, that professional poetry has largely been synonymous with absolute abjection in terms of support without it, poetry is, quite simply, poet on poet action.

Outside of the one moment of public persuasion or innovation in the last decade to put the focus on a single book of poetry (Scott Griffin’s generous internationally revered prize) the poetry industry continues to remain a mystery to majority shareholders (read: people with money who might want to buy our books) and continues to paddle, not battle in self-obsessed parody.

Michael Lista, poetry, rob mclennan Literature