I’d suppose every person had a time when he or she wrote poems on a near weekly basis ore even more often.
I collected some of mine but as probably most of us destroyed the rest in a more the less dramtaical manner.
Now that i am so much older and wiser than then, or probably because this is not the case, i am still writing.
It’s a hobby to profession which is nowadays rather common and the market is flodded with books, collections and magazins from ambitioned though sometimes probably not so gifted authors.
But what i miss most is the aknowledgment of the basis of every written word.
Our history of written words.
This starts with our parents and follows us to school until it hunts us down when we through away some bucks for a book which is so unoriginell and uninspired we KNOW the author has never read the classics, not to speak of any research on what has been written in the used genre itself already.
I am from Germany, familiar with the german history of words (i will call it this for the rest of the text) rather than with the english or any other, though in my time i spent in other countries (foremost english-laguage ones) and in their school i have recocnized the very same faults. Only names and dates change.
I was lucky enough to be raised by a bookseller and someone who loves books as if he was one.
I am familiar with the Grimms, Schiller, Goethe and others who changed our language so much we need to recocnize the works .
I am familiar with the legends and history of my culture and in contrast of the legends of other cultures which tell us so much about the values and habits which return to us even now in the 21st century.
But in all my time i spent in school and highschool, my teachers weren’t the ones who told me about the edda, the nibelungen, beowulf, about the first long stories about the Brother Grimms work beyound their collection of fairytales.
Modern Art is master of all today.
But modern art has tendencies to be abstract, individual and often against all rules. You may condemn it as selfish and without depth or praise it as timless, new and original beyound traditions.
But it does not tell us ANYTHING about our language.
It just tells us how it has never been before the last 50 years or less, a time so short, so full of science other than language that it is not relevant for most of the famous authors we still read.
I call myself the proud owner of several hundreds of book, most of them legends, fairytales or second literature to them, many from different genres such as crime or science fiction and even a broad collection of comics from Japan to franco-belgian.
But most of my classmates read less than one book over the year (school literature not counted)
And the ones they read in school were by no means the basis of our language but rather the final result, rarely older than fifty years.
Many of my classmates weren’t even able to read older literature due to the used language or pace.
But if i count the number of new publications from germany and the percentage of students with higher ambitions towards literature these numbers are by no means equal.
So it’s little surprise that newer books have a growing tendency not to stick to our minds any more.
That they often are horribly researched and that theis messages and morals are as flat as the latest apple notebook.
This is sad since it makes it hard to find new authors which really want to transport something, no matter what genre they write.
But what would be the solution?
I publishers decide to boykot any book with an unoriginal idea, there would be little left.
