You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Honestly, all creative endeavors are for the enjoyment of someone but not everyone. Never a need to get all twisty-knickers about that fact.
Nzinga said it best, but I do like slam poetry as well. It’s great whenever you’re able to get to that kernal of meaning, especially whenever others might gloss over the best bits because they don’t want to go through that extra bit of trouble.
I like to approach poetry from the historical perspective. For the last several hundred years certain people seem to put an artsy-fartsy feel on it. But that wasn’t always the case.
Poetry once served a very basic purpose…it improved our memories in an illiterate world.
James Burke’s examples included:
“Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.”
There’s your weather report.
“Thirty days have September, April June and November.” There’s your calendar.
Then movable type was invented, the price of books fell and it became worthwhile to learn to read. And then people started to give poetry it’s artsy feel.
I like poetry. I had a grade eleven teacher who introduced me to a pretty good anthology, which had The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter in it. Still one of my favourite love poems, along with Eliot’s A Dedication to My Wife and cummings’ Somewhere I Have Never Travelled. I really like Eliot- I’ve memorised a bunch of his poems, including two of the Four Quartets and some of his Ariel poems. I like Dickinson, and Dante, and George Herbert, Wendell Berry, and a whole bunch of other poets.
It’s beautiful, layered, and complex. Good poetry marries words and makes succinct, unforgettable images. And it sounds beautiful, read aloud.
*Tell all the truth, but tell it slant
Success in circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth’s superb surprise.
As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.*
I am not a fan of traditional rhyme and meter verse, but it has its place, and I am not a fan of the shock poetry that most slams seem to go towards. what i get out of the poetry I enjoy is a snippet of truth and insight from another person’s perspective. I could do without the supposed cleverness and triple entendre that many poets try to use, it seems to take the soul out of the verse. Do it without it being forced, and it is a thing of beauty and power.
Writing it is cathartic, even when it is bad.
tm(etered);dr 
I’ve always been attracted to words. In some ways I am a word collector who trawls dictionarys and conversations looking for new and shiny words. Poetry is the attempt to turn words into beauty just as music is to art, painting is to color, or sculpting is to form. And I appreciate that beauty just as one can appreciate a nice painting or concerto. Sure, some poetry gets full of itself but what art doesn’t?
A lot of my friends and peers complain about it. They think it’s silly to spend so much time trying to decode poems and find the meaning. Well, to me that’s part of the pleasure. Some people enjoy hunting ducks, I enjoy hunting metaphors. It’s a lot warmer and less messy. And I love reading new poems. I don’t pretend to be an expert but I do enjoy the attempt. I’d love to see some more examples of poetry that people like. There’s already been some Emily Dickinson, I see. I’ve always had a fascination with Edna St. Vincent Millay myself.
I find some poetry evokes a time and a place as well, if not better than other media.
I find some poetry gives me an insight into how others view the world, gives me more respect for points-of-view that run counter to my own.
Other poetry still reveals commonalities between seemingly disparate human cultures, experiences.
I also find that some poems makes me happy, others makes me very sad.
Wow! I had to be away from my computer for much of the day; maybe I should have started this tomorrow…
It’s interesting - poetry in the form of lyrics surrounds us constantly. Poetry as the naked spoken word or the shining page, much less so. For all that, most of us have a few words of Robert Frost, Emily Dickenson or Maya Angelou that resonate for us.
Somehow, poetry has a harder time riding the fine line between glurge and artifice for many people.
There are many who look down on the limerick, but I’m not one of them. I’ve heard about men from Nantucket or women from China far too often, but I’ve also heard about the musical man from La Tuque, the Mountie from Upper Musquodoboit and the pastry chef down on his luck. There’s just something compelling and jolly about them…
The parallel to classical music is interesting - I don’t know that classical music itself is disparaged as freely, but when I think of TV sitcoms, the first few lovers of classical music that come to mind are Felix Unger (Tony Randall in The Odd Couple), Charles Emerson Winchester III (David Ogden Stiers in MAS*H) and Frasier and Niles Crane (Kelsey Grammar and David Hyde Pierce in Frasier.). That’s a pretty pompous group of people, and I’m struggling to come up with anyone to balance them out…
I appreciate form and rhyme when I’m reading it, but I almost never write in them. I’ve been working almost exclusively in modernist poetry for the last year. One of the things that has helped me delve deeper into it is the idea that the line endings are there to show the search for the next word, and that the poet is using those line endings as a way of transcribing the sound of the poem, as the poet hears it in his head, onto the page. It then becomes the actor’s job to find that sound and lift it off the page.
Among my favourites - W. B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Michael Ondaatje, Seamus Heaney, Matthew Tierney, Jeramy Dodds. I love Beaudelaire and Pablo Neruda as well, but I’m always conscious of the distance caused by the other language.
And for me, there’s been nothing like trying to write some poetry to heighten my appreciation for what others have done. “Your true lover (of music, in the original, but it works just as well for poetry…) does more than admire the muse, he sweats a little in her service.” - Catherine Drinker Bowen, from “Friends and Fiddlers”.
This discussion fascinates me, but I’ve got to get to sleep. More later…
Well, some of us were Traumatized at an early age by an aunt who could make Vogons run from her.
I think that part of the reason that I don’t like poetry is because the poet implies that if I don’t like his/her poem, I simply cannot appreciate the Finer Things In Life. Well, yes, I can. I like some opera and some classical music. I even like some poetry. But most poetry, even the stuff that gets published commercially, is just too precious for me to be able to stomach, or it’s terribly, terribly sincere. Sincerity doesn’t mean that a poem or other literary work is good, it just means that it’s sincere. I think that people who don’t like poetry just don’t care for that style. I particularly don’t like most haiku, because most people just jot down anything that fits the rhyming scheme, without regard as to whether the haiku will also obey the traditional way that the words work in haiku.
And I don’t think that it’s because I’m afraid to read stuff that evokes emotions. I regard fiction that doesn’t make me feel SOMETHING to be a failure. I want to feel happy, or sad, or scared, or in suspense when I read fiction. I want to feel SOMETHING. My favorite books and stories, the ones I read and re-read, are the ones that evoke the strongest emotions in me. Of course, if it’s a book on math, it’s OK if it doesn’t make me feel something. So your theory doesn’t apply to me. Of course, since I do like some poetry, maybe you weren’t talking about people like me.
There’s that famous Wordsworth quotation – poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”; and to me, there’s something to that: poetry is able to transmit the extra-verbal qualities of personal experience, things one would have a hard time to put in prose. You have more ‘channels’ of expression available, additionally to just the words – structure and form, metre, rhyme or lack thereof, tempo, rhetorical period, etc. to transmit the ‘flavour’ of experience rather than just relating it in a descriptive way (true, most prose – good prose, at least – doesn’t content itself with pure description, either, but the principle is far more pronounced in poetry). In short, poetry gives you the ability to communicate the deeply subjective; to use language to truly show rather than merely tell. A good poem, to me, does not merely talk of things, but makes me experience those things.
There’s more to it than that – I do appreciate a poem’s formal beauty, or its imagery, an insightful point of view or a new perspective on a familiar one, but I think first and foremost it’s this vicarious, yet vivid experience that I ‘get out of’ poetry.
Malthus has said much of what I could say, and especially “words that simply sum up the human condition and cannot be forgotten”. Read Frost’s poem “Provide, Provide” for another version of that. link Plus, I think the fact that the words are so well chosen that they stay in your mind is as important as the “human condition” that they state. Interesting that Ministre mentions music in the OP…
I think this scares off a lot of people, and unfairly so. Sometimes you dislike poetry (or opera or…) because you don’t understand it, sometimes you dislike it because, even though you do understand it, it’s not to your personal taste, and sometimes you dislike it because it really is pretentious shit. The poet doesn’t get to decide which one of those it is; the reader does.
To shift briefly to a different medium: I used to walk through art galleries looking carefully at all the artworks and reading all the little cards next to them. It was tedious and exhausting, like studying for an exam. Now I walk through slowly, scan the art as I go and stop whenever something really catches my eye (and there’s no telling what will attract me to something - could be anything). I find that overall I spend more time contemplating the art that really speaks to me and less time looking at stuff I don’t care about. It makes the whole experience much more fulfilling.
Likewise, poems and poets that don’t do anything for me, I ignore. Those that really move or amuse me (Cope, Nash, Rilke, Robinson, to name a few), I read over and over again. You need to sample enough to find what you like, but don’t feel bad if you don’t like something.
It’s not my fault that
Poetry is less pleasant
Than my excrement
I can’t stand poetry, except for two: “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” and “Dulce Est Decorum Est.”
I wasn’t kidding. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I’m suggesting you take the one that leads out of this thread.
Agreed. As I’ve said before, a lot of people who fancy themselves as poets tend to embrace free form because it’s liberating. They treat it as free license to write all sorts of crap and call it poetry.
Absolutely! I’m an enthusiastic anthologist - I’ll read through a collection, taking note of any poems that strike me, then I’ll search out the author’s book and read through that. Many times I’ve come away with only one or two poets that I wanted to follow up on, but something about their work has really struck me.
And I think everybody has the right to decide for themselves what is or is not to their tastes. I have to watch myself that my enthusiasm doesn’t carry over into pushiness. There’s a fine line between “I highly recommend…” and “You have to read…”.
A poem is an opportunity to play.
A lot of people don’t like that. A lot of people like to read things where the meaning is firmly nailed down: The author encoded a meaning in the text and by “correctly” decoding the text as they read they learn what the “proper” meaning is.
Fuck that shit!
I like works that are open, allowing me to wander around inside them. The point isn’t to arrive at a particular destination/interpretation. The point is to take the trip. Good poems work like that.
Uh, really? From the OP:
So, I guess then detesting poetry is a wrong answer after all?
I thought you’d at least be placated when I put my disgust for poetry in the form of a poem. 