Poetry, Hunger, and Electric Lights: Lessons from Iceland on Poetry and its Audience

Our dominant model for the creation and enjoyment of the arts remains centralised production, as the mission statements of cultural organisations show: specialised labourers create a product which then must be distributed or with which the public must be ‘engaged’. During Iceland’s abrupt modernisation (1940–1980) its lyric poetry was cut away from a fabric of popular oral-poetic traditions and retailored as a product offered for purchase in slim volumes. In Icelandic-language interviews conducted in 1981, Icelanders who were old enough to be able to compare the experience of poetry as a communal entertainment with the experience of reading poetry books were invited to do so and to comment on new verse forms. The attitudes that emerge from this material suggest the need for new approaches to the effort to nurture poetic achievement and the public enjoyment of poetry.