KILLING THE ARTS

There are many animals that would have made our world more colourful but have unfortunately gone into extinction. Some were as a result of natural causes and many others as a result of neglection or poor dispositions of men. Now, we can only seat in the corners of our rooms and wonder how the extinct animals looked like.
Events reoccurring in the arts world are not different from that happening in the animal world. Many of our arts and cultural practices have disappeared into the past and several others are at the terminal period of their lives and if not quickly revived, would die. The literary world is in trouble and all that our scholars could do is to fold their arms in akimbo and look.
The literature has three popular genres namely: prose, drama, and poetry. Of all these genres, only one is widely read and given due considerations. The other two have been limited to children classrooms during teaching and what happens outside that, nobody cares. Where prose boasts, poetry and drama hide their faces. This is because prosaic works get more recognitions in terms of huge number of people that read it, thousands prizes its carries, proliferation of publishing houses that are ever ready to publish it. Poetry and drama do not enjoy the above stated privileges. They have few readership base, fewer awards, and to crown it all, publishing houses ran away from them for commercial sake forgetting their undocumented allegiance to promote the beauties of the arts. No wonder, contemporary poets and playwrights have opted for prose writing for easy money, fame and tiara of awards.
Nothing kills faster than abandonment. People are fast forgetting these poor arts. They obviously have forgotten that what poetry powerfully expressed on one page of paper, drama does the same in thirty pages and prose does the same in fifty or more pages. Poetry and drama are beautiful because of their precision and their conventional replica of the human societies. They should be encouraged. Publishing houses should reignite their love for the arts as they were in the yore. Publishing houses should erase that “we don’t publish poetry and unsolicited drama by new writers” from their respective websites. Reviewers should give similar attitudes they gave to cinemas to dramatic write ups of new playwrights. Poetry sites such as poemhunter and a few others should do a review of their top hundred poems of all time. There could have been poems written by new poets that could dethrone Mayer Angelou off her number one position and others in the ranking. This will encourage new poets to want to go extra length in their writings and creat healthy competition needed to reenergize the arts.
Just as some beautiful animals that have gone into extinction as a result of poor handlings of men, drama and poetry could go the same way if we fail to help them.