A. Background

A survey conducted by the Washington Post in 2012 said that only 6.7 percent of people read literature at least one book a year. LSI Denny JA in 2018 conducted a similar survey research in the Indonesian scale and the results that there were only 6 percent of people who read at least one literature book a year.

Why is the readership of literature, especially poetry, declining? According to John Barr, the founder of the foundation ‘Poetry: A Magazine of Verse’, said that the public is increasingly separated from the world of poetry. It is not because the public left poetry, but instead, the poetry writing has stagnated. There has been no significant change for decades. The wider public feels increasingly distant from the world of poetry. The poets are only engrossed in their own fantasies and communication with their fellowship, whose community is getting smaller and smaller. They develop a ‘high language’ but that type of language is increasingly difficult for the public to understand. Thereby, the public stays away from the world of poetry. Substantively, a classy language is not that hard to fathom, it is in fact, an aesthetic language that focuses on the beauty of the language itself.

Pop culture also develops and is used daily, but literature and poetry do not adapt. Social language becomes the dominant space of our daily life for 24 hours. So in terms of language alone, we are actually quite distanced from the class of civilized society.

Yet at the same time, literary works, especially in this case poetry, are still being written. Poets kept popping up. Literary works which incidentally are “in charge” of eradicating the language of society and transforming it to a higher level seem to have failed to carry out that task. Maybe because literature is already far from society; because it was not written to be understood by the public, but to be understood by the literary circles themselves; because it is not absorbed from the pulse of society, but from the imagination of the writer himself who stands in an empty world, not a harsh and tragic world of social reality.

As a result, literary works experience involution, swirl within themselves. They are unable to raise the inner voice of the community, and fail to raise the quality of the community’s language.

B. The Birth of Essay Poetry and Its Role

People actually love literary works, as long as they are presented with literary works that represent their inner world and the pulse of their daily lives. This is one of the roles of the emergence of essay poetry. It wants to return poetry to the modern society.

Therefore, essay poetry puts real social issues into the heart of poetry with beautiful language, but also easy for the public to understand. The accuracy of data from these issues can be accounted for because the truth can be traced and there are documents of the events.

Essay Poetry also answers the modern time challenges by using the medium of film, animation, and song to express its ideas. Creative works of poetry must be enjoyed by people who now prefer audio-visual treats.

It is official that essay poetry has become a new word in the Indonesian Dictionary (KBBI) on May 2021.