JMWW

Last week, due to financial necessity, administrators at Johns Hopkins University axed the poetry concentration in the MA in Writing Program. Why would I, a student in the Fiction track, care? Why should you care?by Linda Simoni-Wastila

Without poetry, the music of words favors a steadier bass beat, ta-dum ta-dum, the steady march to climax or resolution, rather than the lyrical upsweep or denouement of a stanza, the melody of alliteration and assonance.

Without poetry, the shape of work takes a singular approach, one that relies on the paragraph, a boxy form, rather than any infinite of shapes: sonnet, sestina, concrete, quatrain, haibun, ghazal.

Without poets, the world loses the necessary advocacy of the spoken word, the creation of transcendent meaning.

Without poets, the world loses a tradition that harkens back to Sappho, to Shakespeare, to Yeats and Blake, Frost and Sexton, Plath and Dickinson, Hughes and Collins and…

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