"For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry"
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Muldoon’s line lands like a casual shrug that’s secretly an indictment. The opener, “For whatever reason,” is a defensive fog machine: it pretends not to know, which lets him name the problem without sounding like he’s begging for an audience. Then comes the twist of the knife - “including very well-educated people” - a reminder that schooling and literacy don’t automatically produce attention, patience, or appetite. Poetry isn’t being rejected by the uninitiated; it’s being skipped by the people most likely to own hardbacks and subscribe to magazines. That’s the cultural embarrassment he’s surfacing.
The subtext is less “poetry is hard” than “our idea of reading has changed.” In a status economy, the novel and the nonfiction blockbuster read as productive: they offer plot, information, a sense of measurable progress. Poetry asks for rereading, ambiguity, and a tolerance for not immediately “getting it.” Muldoon, a poet steeped in dense allusion and verbal play, knows his own art can feel like a locked room - and he also knows that the lock isn’t only stylistic. It’s institutional and commercial: poetry’s marginal shelf space, the way it’s taught as a code to crack, the disappearance of common venues where poems once circulated as public speech.
The intent, then, isn’t self-pity. It’s a cool, unsentimental diagnosis of attention and prestige: even “reading people” often treat poetry as a hobby with social risk, something you’re supposed to respect from a distance, not actually do. Muldoon makes that hypocrisy plain in one plainspoken sentence.
The subtext is less “poetry is hard” than “our idea of reading has changed.” In a status economy, the novel and the nonfiction blockbuster read as productive: they offer plot, information, a sense of measurable progress. Poetry asks for rereading, ambiguity, and a tolerance for not immediately “getting it.” Muldoon, a poet steeped in dense allusion and verbal play, knows his own art can feel like a locked room - and he also knows that the lock isn’t only stylistic. It’s institutional and commercial: poetry’s marginal shelf space, the way it’s taught as a code to crack, the disappearance of common venues where poems once circulated as public speech.
The intent, then, isn’t self-pity. It’s a cool, unsentimental diagnosis of attention and prestige: even “reading people” often treat poetry as a hobby with social risk, something you’re supposed to respect from a distance, not actually do. Muldoon makes that hypocrisy plain in one plainspoken sentence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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