Shiloh: "We as a culture have the attention span of a gnat ... "
The image of the poet - with a quill pen, maybe sporting a beret - is a dead stereotype that lingers on in the mind; it can't match to today's video game generation, or cell phone, says poet/writer D.L. Shiloh, who worked in marketing for over a decade.
"The poem is like life - brief, instant, and can say so much in a short time," Shiloh said. "Poetry had a good niche but then artists like Bob Dylan took over and reinvented pop music. There was no need for a stand-alone poet because all of the poets strapped on a guitar and sang. And what is taught in schools is locked down by rules and boundaries. The time has come for poetry to see a resurgence in popular culture. In society's mind, it's still in the 19th century."
The artist just has to use the tools to get the word out that fits the method, Shiloh insists.
"We as a culture in 2009 have the attention span of a gnat and so poetry is the perfect art," Shiloh added. "We only pay attention if it crashed, died or will lead us to money. We rarely read, are fed ideas through a pablum of pre-fab TV, movies and single hits by one-off artists. We'd rather Twitter or text. Humans have only 10 seconds of attention span; maybe 5 seconds. Billboards are perfect when they have 7 words or less. If things aren't going well we hit restart or put in a new DVD. DVR technology has erased most of the commercials we were captive to. We search but can't find true meaning out of all the chaos and rush to live. The good news is that the culture is ready for 1 Minute of Meaning."
A sample of Shiloh's poetry can be read at http://www.dublinwriters.org/
