If I came off that way, I apologize. I have an interest in why people don’t like poetry, but I have no problem with the answer being “Because it sucks.”
I identified as a poet so that my motivation would be more clear. I want to know because I wonder if it can be fixed. But it appears it made my motivation murky instead.
I generally don’t read poetry because, to be blunt, there’s a lot of shitty poetry out there. I used to think that poetry was esoteric and that once you “get” it, it’s very enjoyable (in the same way that after two years of vocal training, I’m starting to “get” opera). There’s just one hitch: Shakespeare. When one of his sonnets reduced me to tears the first time I read it, I knew I had read a truly great poem. No other poet’s work has moved me in any appreciable way since I read that sonnet, and certainly not before. I imagine that if I were to seek out good poetry by other artists, it would mean hundreds of hours reading boring works of overrated poets. That’s totally unappealing to me, especially since I have a really good nose for picking good films to watch.
Ah, now I remember. That’s why I stopped reading new poets. The “slam” culture is an even more pretentious development. It’s the creative outlet of choice for people who want to be very precious rock stars, but have no musical talent. See, I take the completely opposite approach and stand with Philip Larkin on this. I have almost no interest in hearing poetry read aloud. I used to have some interest in reading poetry aloud, but even then I had no interest in hearing it.
The thing about the written word is it’s entirely user-driven. If I need to think about something, I can put it down, and then pick it back up when I like. I don’t have to sit through an hour straight of poetry, I can have as much or as little in the course of the day as I want.
I don’t think of myself as a poetry reader because of three main reasons:
I was forced to read it in school. Hated the forcing, so I have a bad reaction to it. Same thing with basketball.
Well-written poetry is supposed to follow certain forms. I don’t know enough about them to know whether a bad poem is bad because it doesn’t follow the form, or because it’s a form I don’t know, and it just sucks because it sucks.
Dartboard-style writing.
All finding
over meaning
the without
page whiplash
too difficult
on
the reader's
brain
that's me, btw.
This is why you’ll find many more fans of older poetry than newer. Tennyson was hardly one of a few poets of his day, but he’s one of the few who’s remembered. The chaff that anyone alive then must have had to sort through is gone and forgotten. That’s not the case with modern poetry yet, and I prefer to let literary critics do the sorting for me.
Heavens, yes! When it comes to much modern poetry, there’s very little payoff for the effort of reading it… or even worse, listening to it.
Just two weeks ago, I was cringing at some horrible coffeeshop poetry that some poor schmuck decided to inflict on his audience. Clumsy rhymes, awkward breaks between phrases and no discernable meter… yet he read it as though it was great stuff. Ugh.
As you said, it seems like everyone thinks they can write poetry.
I liked poetry at one point, and then just stopped caring.
I compare it to people going through their wine phase. At first they’re all about it, and then hopefully they say, “Hey. Whoa. This is just fermented grape juice, that’s really all it is. How much did I pay for this?!” Life’s too short and the world too wide for me to care if they fermented the grapes in France or California or Italy.
Poetry is just words splattered around in someone’s attempt to create an artistic effect, and at a certain point I just became acutely aware of it. I don’t really consider the time invested to be worth the payoff, because I can derive similar enjoyment from less obtuse and less pretentious media. My life’s just too short to ponder the meaning of someone’s indenting a certain line, or the choosing a particular turn of phrase.
It’s just not interesting to me anymore. I’m not sure why it ever was.
Caveat: I do distinguish reading poetry, which I avoid, from hearing it read, which when done well can be more than worth the time spent.
As evidenced by the coffeeshop dreck that I mentioned earlier. It pretty much smacks of self-importance.
In high school and in college, pompous teachers would tell us what a poem “meant.” That meaning was never what I thought it was, and when I guessed wrong, I was corrected. I thought, “Has this teacher interviewed the poet? How do we know the official meaning?” So, poetry was presented as a form that was intentionally encoded so as to make me look stupid. Screw that. I didn’t need any help to make me feel bad; I had my father for that, and he did a right fine job of it.
These days, I appreciate the beauty of a well-crafted phrase, but if you’re trying to hide your meaning from me, I don’t need that kind of amusement.
I do read poetry. But I don’t read much contemporary stuff, my taste being mostly early/mid twentieth century–Edna St. Vincent Millay, for instance, or Wallace Stevens, or Langston Hughes.
I was wondering about this yesterday. Well, I was wondering about when poetry became marginalized instead of mainstream. I read poetry- heck, I bought two books of poetry yesterday- but I don’t read it as often as I do novels. It requires more effort and concentration than I have to give when I just want to pick something up and read.
I like poetry, particularly when it’s read aloud. For me, the experience is at least half the feeling of the spoken words. Because of this I tend to memorise my favourites. I have the kind of brain that picks up linked words, especially rhyming ones.
*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.*
-Emily Dickinson
Sorry, this is kind of random. Just an applicable bit of verse.
I think people are on the wrong track about poetry sucking or being marginalized or whatever.
First of all, answer this question: is there a “correct” amount of poetry we’re supposed to be reading, and have we definitively fallen beneath that amount?
Was there some time in the past when we were all poetry-reading-motherfuckers, and as a result we had a peaceful, gentle society?
Maybe we’re reading TOO MUCH poetry.
Maybe we should ask, “why do people read ANY poetry AT ALL?”
Maybe all the answers in this thread are completely invalid because we’re reading too much poetry.
Anyway, the sum total of my current exposure is what I see in the New Yorker. I took a class in college, though.
It doesn’t all suck. And, it’s not all arrogant and pompous.
But, let’s look at that attitude for a second. . .
There was a poem in the New Yorker a month or so back about “The Fog” or “The Wind” or something etheral. It was a nice, haunting kind of wistful poem. As I recall, at some point, the author revealed it was about her daughter who had died.
Now, I’d suspect some people (in this thread) would call that pompous or arrogant or say, “why can’t she just write an essay about her daughter dying?”
Well, I don’t think words or thoughts should be forced to be that way. The author is left with feelings, and images, and memories of her daughter. Is prose the “correct” way to write about that? Why do those things have to be conveyed with a style of writing that more closely mimics how we talk? You can express those things through painting, music, poetry, etc.
It doesn’t make the author pompous because she picked poetry.
So, anyway, I try to start most of poems in the New Yorker. If a word or phrase or image grabs me, I try to keep going. If not, I move on. So, sometimes a poem takes work. Big whoop. They’re not meant to be literal.
I don’t usually start poems that have been translated. It seems wrong to me to read a translated poem.
No, but I think you could make a case that during the 19th century increasing rates of literacy would have qualified us as some poetry-reading sons of bitches.
I enjoy narrative works more than symbolic works. I do read a lot of story poems–“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is one of the greatest pieces of writing ever, even school didn’t wreck that one–but I just don’t enjoy non-narrative writing, stuff that’s meant to impart an emotion directly instead of letting us empathize with a character and learn about the symbol or metaphor along with them. I used to write some poetry but even then my stuff was more narrative and I figured out I could just write short stories and get a lot more readers.
Also I agree with whoever said that sometimes poetry is used as a way to “trick” people and make them look dumb. A good poet won’t do this, but many modern poets will make their meaning as obscure as possible and then when the readers don’t get it they’re like “Ha! I really meant THIS! I win the poetry game!” I like clarity. You don’t have to hit me over the head with a 2x4 but don’t make me struggle either. Good art should not be a struggle to get through. It should be a delight, and a lot of poetry (especially modern stuff) is not. Writing doesn’t have to be obscure to have meaning.
I agree about the translations and I’m sitting here trying to figure out why. I think it has to do with the intimacy of poetry. It is such a small window into a private world. It’s one person’s distillation of experience into a certain discipline.
I always wonder if foreign poets resent the liberties taken with their work–or do they have input into the translations? How could they, since they don’t know the language?
I also agree that poetry does take extra effort–and sometimes it is worth every bit of struggle.
There are times in my life (like the grieving I did ltwo years ago) when I did not want and could not focus on something as linear as a plot or any type of prose. Poetry rose to the occasion very well. It resonated with me in way that no self-help book, friendly chat, posting here, novel, whathaveyou could.
Probably when people decided that “poetry” was a description of quality, rather than the name of a genre. I imagine many, many people who say they “don’t like poetry” like a lot of song lyrics just fine, and they’re a subcategory of poetry.
It’s also apparent, reading this thread, that many, many people (including English teachers) aren’t comfortable with art that isn’t necessarily intended to convey one particular, concrete meaning. Poetry is often an abstract art built from concrete words, and if you’re really interested in narrative or an argument or a crystal-clear meaning, poetry isn’t the art for you. Usually.
I used to read poetry. I stopped reading most of it when I was in my 20s, sometime after I stopped writing it. Basically, the pleasure and edification I felt I was deriving from it was not justifying the amount of time I put into it. One of these days, I suspect I’ll try harder to read more of it, but I don’t exactly feel guilty about not doing so.
For me, it’s just that poetry is as much about the “music of language” as the meaning of the poem. Maybe more importantly, it’s about the marriage of the two.
I know that poetry translation is probably it’s own art, but think about trying to translate something you know from English. . .take a random but well-known line. . .
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
How you gonna translate that shit?
How you gonna translate the alliteration, the rhythm, the rhyme, the meaning, the juxtapositions simultaneously?
As far as I’m concerned – and I know SHIT ALL about poetry but I won’t let something like that stop me – that can’t be translated. The SOUND of it – IN ENGLISH – IS the art of it. It’s illogical to me to even try to translate it.
It makes more sense to me to have someone who doesn’t know a word of English to hear it in English to appreciate it.
I read some poetry, but not as much as I might or “should.” Part of the reason, as others have mentioned, is that it’s hard to find the good stuff amidst all the crap (or the stuff that just doesn’t do much for me). There’s no bestseller list for poems, no awards for great poems on a scale that the general populace would ever hear about or care about; famous poets never guest-host Saturday Night Live or appear on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.
I also agree with some of the criticisms of much of today’s poetry: That it’s self-indulgent, written for the benefit of the writer, not the reader. That it’s associated with the pretentious and intellectual; there isn’t really any non-highbrow outlet or market for poetry. The abandonment of traditional forms and poetic devices; when poetry lost rhyme, meter, etc., it lost a lot of what made it appealing to people.
Except that there’s one sort of poetry that these criticisms don’t apply to: song lyrics. Not all song lyrics qualify as great poetry, or even as poetry at all, but I think some of them do. I think song lyrics are filling much of the same role today (and for the past few decades) that poetry filled earlier, and that many of the best “poets” working today are songwriters (including rappers, probably, though I don’t pay enough attention to rap to be sure).
I love poetry, but it’s hard to find collections that aren’t striving to show off their intellectual accomplishments - that is, writing poetry to be know as “a poet” instead of for it’s own sake. So I don’t read it nearly enough as I’d like, as this makes me hesitatnt to invest time or money in an unknown poet’s works. A lack of free time contributes to this as well.
I know. I agree with you. And poetry is one form that squeezes every last drop of all of the above and more to make an impact. (so much for metaphors!)
I was thinking of Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening when I posted --how would that sound auf Deutsch? You would get the surface meaning, but what about the subtleties?
But sadly, poems like that are not made today, or if they are, not known. We don’t yet know whose work will have a lasting impact. Maybe the public has to “catch up” and poetry, like modern or post-modern art is too cutting edge, too busy talking to itself and playing to an ever decreasing audience…