Even before they were doodling on cave walls, people were telling stories to each other. The earliest stories in mankind were usually told in some kind of meter and rhyme so they could more easily be remembered and passed on generation through generation. Poetry, therefore, is about as old as humanity itself.
From our earliest beginnings forward, poetry has played a significant role in nearly all human societies. After generations memorizing it and reciting it, people started writing it down, copying it, passing manuscripts around and, eventually, printing it in books. In a way, poetry peaked a few hundred years later in the Romantic and Victorian periods, where people literally sat around reciting poetry to each other for fun, and Lord Byron's fans made Team Edward girls and Beiber fever-ites look bored in comparison.
But somewhere after that, poetry got lost. Blame whoever you want--modernist poets making it way too confusing to understand, post-modernists having way too much fun with form, society getting dumber, whatever--but the simple truth is poetry just isn't what it used to be. It's so bad now, actually, that a couple years ago someone wrote in to Parade magazine and asked why the US wastes tax dollars on a Poet Laureate if no one reads poetry anymore. I thought the answer they published to that question was genius. They quoted the American poet William Carlos Williams: "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." (They also pointed out that the US Poet Laureate gets a grand total of $30,000 a year and is paid through a trust fund, not taxes, so there, poetry haters.)
I read this article after I had first started reading and writing poetry seriously. I ripped it out of the magazine, drew a big circle around it, wrote "PROBLEM" across the page, and put it up in my room, deciding that I wanted to do something about it.
When I came to BYU and got involved with the English Society, Tara (president of the society) approached me about making a poetry interest group within the club. We worked together and the result was PiND: Poetry is Not Dead, an interest group dedicated to the propagation of poetry in modern everyday life. For now, we're based here on this blog and the Facebook group called BYU PiND. Check in here and there as we expand, posting poems, links, apps, events, and basically anything to get a little poetry in your life and the life of others.
Poetry is definitely not dead. We're here to prove it.
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