I don\u2019t point it out in the poem emails often, but on the Poetry Chaikhana website home page, I post a list of the most popular poets. This is essentially a list of the ten most visited pages organized by poet. The results may surprise you. Here is this week\u2019s most popular poets:<\/p>\n
Yunus Emre
\nKabir
\nDickinson
\nAttar
\nRumi
\nO\u2019Donohue
\nMary Oliver
\nSzymborska
\nBulleh Shah
\nJacopone da Todi<\/p>\n
Jacopone da Todi showed up on the list because I featured one of his poems last week. <\/p>\n
Featured poets usually get a bump in attention. Other poets that regularly show up on this list include Kobayashi Issa, Basava, Hafiz\/Ladinsky, Dogen, Ikkyu, Lalla, Abu-Said Abil-Kheir, among others.<\/p>\n
I love to see who is gaining attention out there in the world. Yunus Emre, for example, is still not widely known in the west, but he is clearly beloved in Turkey and by many followers of Sufi traditions around the world. My hope is that, over time, appreciation of his wisdom and humor and humble spiritual genius will expand, as it has done with widely known figures like Rumi and Kabir. And the Poetry Chaikhana plays a part in that.<\/p>\n
I am also fascinated by how this list changes week-to-week and also over the years. There was a period a few years back when the great Punjabi Sufi poet Bulleh Shah was the most visited page on the Poetry Chaikhana website week after week for months on end. But, like Yunus Emre, he is not well known in the West. Yet clearly there is a great love of his poetry and hunger for information on him out there. <\/p>\n
Others that popped up regularly in this list only rarely do so now, like Han Shan (Cold Mountain), Basho, and Walt Whitman. What does that mean? I know the Poetry Chaikhana web statistics aren\u2019t the best reflection of global interests, but does it suggest anything about the rising and falling popularity of specific poets? Or perhaps a general shift in attention as political and planetary crises vie for our focus? Are we just exploring different poetic and spiritual energies? <\/p>\n
What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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