Journal 10

Journal 10 - What is Poetry?

My entire collection of experience with poetry comes directly from school english classes. I’m sure I’ve ran through some in reading novels or just through cruising through my eighteen years, but it’s never really been a conscience effort of my own to get into or learn more about any kind of poetry. For the most part it frustrates me when people shut a whole category of something out simply because they don’t like it or because they have difficulty with it, but as there are exceptions to everything there are hypocrisies to delve in to. Poetry holds a special place in my heart as a boycott and a frustration. I look at it, and I’d like to think I understand most of it, but it just doesn’t matter to me. I’ve tried and tried with different poetry icons and I just can’t make myself give a damn about poetry. With thought out assurance I can claim with almighty arrogance that when most people look at poetry and claim brilliance or poetic art, they’re goofs. How many times in class I’ve witnessed people trying to dissect the words in a poem only to end up with some generic, half baked tripe about some deeper meaning behind something, usually starting with “Well, when I read X, I think it’s a metaphor for Y, at least in my mind anyway”, or something of the like. Poetry to me is taking nothing and making it in to more nothing and labelling it as a something.

The study of poetry to me is wasted time that could be used for studying something of “value” (When I say this, I don’t mean to extend the notion that poetry is without any value, simply that it lacks apparent value to me). I know there are plenty of people out there with a far greater understanding of poetry than me, but the idea of spending curriculum space on anything more than a brief run through for poetry is jokes. Yeah, it may open up some newfound poets to the genre, but how “useful” it is to teach our children poetry instead of say, painting or welding.? Carpenters 1, poets, 0.