I though that this was interesting from _meta_filter:

Because I have a passing familiarity with Bukowski, if I saw someone reading a volume, I'd have some snap insight into what their interests may be. Though I often judge a reader by their book's cover, I could do this with very few poetry books, and I can't remember seeing anyone with a poetry book, or telling me about a poetry book in a long time.

Okay so questions for everyone:

1) When was the last time you saw somebody in public reading a poetry book? (ie on the subway, in a park, et al?)

2) What was it?

3) What snap judgments did you make?

1) When was the last time you saw somebody in public reading a poetry book? (ie on the subway, in a park, et al?)

Great question, Steven; I really can't think of anything in recent memory. Although, if *I* count, a notable experience would have been reading Daniel F. Bradley's "A Boy's First Book of Chlamydia" while on the Lakeshore West GO-Train. A woman actually spied what I was reading and changed seats.

2) What was it?

See above.

3) What snap judgments did you make?

I was proud because I may have been the only one who wasn't reading the Da Vinci Code or playing Sudoku on the entire twelve-car train. No kidding.

It’s really scary — there are fewer and fewer people who read even one novel in a year, much less a book of poetry — nobody reads poetry anymore. Like Dana Gioia claims, people used to.

Yes, people used to read it, but starting with modernists poetry became pruprosefully "difficult" and couched in obscure lit-theory. After modernism died, poetry moved from "cultural bohemia" into the university where its direction has been commandeered theorists and academics poets who who are pretty much its audience.

starting with the modernists poetry became purposefully "difficult" and couched in obscure lit-theory

Purposefully? I'm not so sure. Are you contending that there was a concerted effort among the modernists to make poetry less accessible and move it into academia?

Were they cause or effect?

No, I mean for the modernists, the great reading public spoke! Sales of early Modernist works were terrible. It wasn't the modernists as much as their students who rose into positions of promincence in the academic and publishing worlds -- what after the second war -- that Modernism became accepted by the educated classes.

The older generation of readers gradually died out. Literature for them was culture both popular and otherwise, a lifetime of becoming familiar with books which couldn't be summarized in critical theory or packed into three-year undergraduate courses.

They were the effect, I guess.

Cool -- I'm looking to compile a list of answers to these questions. I also asked the same questions on the Foetry And poets.org boards:

http://poets.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5357

http://foetry.com/newbb/