Couldn't agree more, Peter. I abandoned writing poetry some time ago, partly for the reasons you have outlined.

I think re-connecting poetry to the voice may be the key to its rebirth. We need to feel the music of the language -- metre, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and all the rest. If the music is strong and the voice engaged even quite complex thoughts and radical viewpoints are more accessible.

So now should we set up a website to promote this sort of poetry?

I think some of your points are valid, but I think something else is going on here and that you should be careful not to be an apologist for an increasingly anti-intellectual mass consumer culture. Pound and Eliot sold well, but their work is just as hard to follow as much of the current material. Poetry is a discipline to read which requires, like modern art in general, an aesthetic literacy that is not easy to come by. Much modern painting sells for millions, but Joe Blow public thinks its hogwash just like they do the poetry. The difference is merely that the free market has found a way to commoditize some "rock star" art forms, but not others. It may be that the publishers are not willing to make their poets into rock stars, not the other way around. Of course, why must the artist be a rock star to find success? Its a kind of Lordship, I suppose; the new legitimizer of aristocracy in the arts. The masses still need to believe that the artist is so important, not because of what they perceive from their art, but something more mysterious. Please click my pen name and be your own judge, or listen here: http://www.myspace.com/kenboe

There is this other problem with Peter Tapsell's article: it is so radically oblivious to the facts.

To sustain the generalisations for a moment, those 'classic' poets (by which I think Tapsell means any dead poet whose sales vindicate his claim that classic poets still sell well) tended to be MUCH more technically obsessive than the current generations about whom he complains. Their verse-schemes were more elaborate, and the vocabulary with which they described and analysed verse was much larger.

If you mean that poets should be more folksy these days, that may or may not have some validity -- but to accuse contemporary poetry of over-techniquing it is pretty extraordinary.

Chop up
some prose
into short lines.

avoid capitals.

Add

Some gaps, and sprinkle
with random - punctuation!

you have
Modern
Poetry.

It's easy! Anyone can do it!

And that's why
it's
crap.