I don't get poetry.

Published on July 15, 2004 By Jamie Burnside In Blogging

I am a regular blogger here on JoeUser. I write fairly often, and I read about ten-or-so blogs each day.

A lot of blog entries feature poetry. I see that the poems are well-received and commented upon. That is good for the poet and his or her audience.

The deal is that personally, I just don't "get" poetry. There aren't many poems that I can read from beginning to end without getting immediately disinterested. Sometimes it amazes me how popular written poetry is.

I wonder why this is? Does anyone else not particularily care for poetry?

I like music with lyrics, and I like clever turns of a phrase (such as what is found in satire), I suppose that limericks are okay, but long-winded emotional prose completely disinterests me. (For example: I'd always skip through the Oompa Loompa songs in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," or completely disregard the longer verses in "The Lord of the Rings" series. They just didn't hold my interest.)

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Before I am potentially "flamed" by the poet community: I have nothing against poets or poetry appreciators. I hope that they have long careers as poets, and many years of continued enjoyment respectively. It just isn't for me...

Comments

Angloesque

on Jul 15, 2004

Funny you should write this. My mom was reading over our wedding programs, on which we had a few lines from our favorite poems. She sat down next to me and said, "Okay, explain this to me. It doesn't rhyme, so how is it poetry?"

I told her about internal rhyme and the need to read it aloud and of looking at each line to see if itself was a miniature poem, but she still didn't get it.

Finally, I told her to read poems as if they're beautiful paragraphs with strange line breaks. I think she sort of got it then--at least she claims she did.

But I'm sure she doesn't. I didn't and still don't get a lot of them, and I'm getting a graduate degree in poetics. So, I hear you. Try to see them as paragraphs that couldn't otherwise get published (Who publishes books of paragraphs, anyway? Hallmark? That's hardly on the NYT topseller lists). And if you still don't get it, it's all good.

Cheers.

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