For the longest time, I’ve dreaded the inevitable poetry unit in classes. Since that was my only exposure to poetry, I suppose I’ve dreaded reading poetry in general. But over the past two years, poetry has started to creep into my life to the point where I’m reading and writing it almost daily. Despite this new acceptance of poetry, I still feel ambiguous about the art form, which—as a literature student, consumer, and fanatic—has caused me an inordinate amount of undue stress.
Not only have I always preferred prose over poetry, I’ve totally dismissed poetry as a genre worth pursuing. There doesn’t seem to be a modern audience for poetry (at least, the audience is rather small), and I have always gravitated towards prose. I think I connected to prose better because there is more context and character development, which is one of the things I look for in fiction. I am easily drawn into novels or other types of long narrative. Poetry always failed to enthrall me, and my eyes often glazed over before I could finish a poem, despite their brevity. I also often found that the rhyming in some poems felt forced and unnatural. And to be honest, although my views on poetry have altered somewhat, my eyes still glaze over when I read a lot of poetry and some rhyme schemes make me cringe, so I suppose I’m simply more picky about what poems I like and dislike.
But in order to become picky, I had to actively consider poetry as an art form. And that involved addressing a lot of misconceptions I had about poetry.
Perhaps the main source of my confusion surrounding poetry is the juxtaposition between two ideologies of what poetry essentially entails:
- that poetry is deliberately and intentionally written to be obscure and complex, and
- that anything can be poetry as long as the creator calls it poetry (within reason, of course).
The first ideology—the idea that the reader isn’t supposed to easily understand a poem and a poem is supposed to be confusing—I largely encountered in school, odd as it may seem. I can understand that educators try to encourage students to read between the lines of a poem and discover hidden meanings, but their emphasis on poetry’s inherent ambiguous nature made me feel like any interpretation I obtained was inevitably wrong. I’ve realized that I had to overcome this idea of a poem as an intangible, mysterious, almost semi-divine entity in order to enjoy poetry. One of my absolute favorite things about art is its interpretive power, and I’ve come to really love analyzing poems, looking for that deeper meaning, and feeling confident in that interpretation.
The second ideology, which is basically an extremely loose definition of poetry, was a shock because it seemed to embrace simplicity rather than complexity, and because it seemed to disregard any rules of poetry. This should have been freeing, but I found that by throwing out any rules of poetry, people also tended to throw out any standards. Honestly, it made me lose any respect for the art form I had managed to obtain.
Note that I am not simply talking about free verse poems, which do not follow a rhyme scheme. Free verse poems in which the author puts thought in the form, structure, and diction can be incredible. Rather, I’m referring to poems like the ones below, which are basically tweets or a random regurgitation of words that publishers somehow agreed to deem poetry.
I also understand that poetry is art and art is subjective, but in my opinion, the idea that poetry has to be accepted as good because of a well-intentioned author or because a poem can be anything expressed by a “poet” is leading to lazy poetry and a degradation of the art form.
As someone who is just emerging as a poetry consumer, sifting through the abundance of modern poetry—most of which appears to be lazy excuses for written art—seems a daunting task, and I’m still deciding if it’s a worthwhile one.
All that being said, I have come to admire the intention behind each word that a poet includes, and the beauty of phrases that seem to exist only within poetry. I have learned that poetry isn’t something to be feared, but something to approach with an analytical and open mind. I have also realized that there are some emotions that prose can’t seem to do justice; they can only be expressed through poetry.
I still can’t freely say I “love” poetry, and I still approach the art form with caution, but I’m definitely more open to reading both older and modern poetry… if I can find a curated list of modern poetry that actually demonstrates careful authorial intent.
