"Poets: Really, they're the laziest, stupidest people I know." - Christian Bök, 2009
Convenient Poetics is an "aesthetic" formed around ignorances. If we have never learned basic scansion--which most haven't--then meter isn't necessary. We can just write prose and let our ENTER key take things from there. Sonics? Too much effort. Performance? Why bother as long a publisher will put it in print? It's not like anyone is going to want to hear or read this, right?
When the failure of this approach is pointed out Convenient Poets ("ConPos") shrug and say:
"Poetry is subjective!"While this may be true, three goat herders in Outer Mongolia won't form a market large enough to make the effort worthwhile. Yes, it does matter if people like your work.
As poetry faded into obscurity an insignificant few keepers of the flame remained in the center. Without prosody, the rest were left with nothing except Convenient Poetics and, of course, the dreaded Content Regency.
On the Right
On the monied end of the spectrum are the universities, supported by the public, alumni, and tuitions, and the Foundation, supported by the Ruth Lilly (1915-2009) $200M donation in 2003. To its credit, the Poetry Foundation has a comprehensive online archive and worked with the National Endowment for the Arts Endowment to give us "Poetry Out Loud!" Meanwhile, Poetry Magazine and academia created cryptocrap: artless pseudo-intellectual amphigouri. Brain farts. No technique. No rhythm. No performance value.
"It's too boring to be prose so it must be poetry!"
On the Left
Performance fans skew younger. We might see them as slammers, spoken worders or open mikers. The content is all too "accessible": Heart farts. To their credit, these actors often memorize their presentations.
Thus, technicians understand that poetry is memorable speech while academics insist that it is forgettable writing. And the spoken word poets? By definition, they understand that poetry is speech and they do recognize the value of performance and memory. They just have to add more mnemonics and find content beyond their own navels.
Conclusion
It follows that any hope of creating iconic poems and reviving poetry itself lies in educating spoken verse enthusiasts.