Truth about Poetry

I must confess, like many others around me, I do not like poetry. I do not enjoy reading it or writing my own. I cannot even rhyme a few sentences together. I know that this isn’t very fair but this was not something I’ve been introduced to very early in my life. From what I can remember, I’ve only studied poetry once in my life, and this was in the 6^th grade. I even remember the panic I experienced when my teacher assigned our class an end-of-the-year project –to write a dozen poems that focuses on a single theme. I never written a poem before and these poems had to be of different types and lengths. Finally, I composed a booklet full of various poems about war and death with reflection from the then-still recent terrorist attack. My friends and classmates mostly made poems about puppies and kittens, peace, cars, and other non-disturbing topics. I still have that packet and I’ve reread my poems and I think they’re absolutely terrible (I was 12 so I did not expect much).

The truth is, I’ve never been comfortable with poems and I’ve never had a real academic and educational approach to it. It was always a given that everyone has some solid creative understanding of poetry. Whereas, I usually just wing it. If I cannot and do not know how to write poetry, how am I supposed to understand it?

Poems to me are condensed stories. They’re metaphorical segments of an idea or tale which as a reader, it is your duty to read, analyze, take apart, and understand it. But I am not too good at it and it does not just magically come to me. I have trouble of making connections between the lines of poetry.

This is why the reading assignment was a huge frustration to me. No matter how many times I would reread a line, I would not know what the author is trying to tell me. For example, the poem “Brooklyn Bridge” by Hart Crane had me sighing in frustration. I was understanding the poem as: some man committed suicide, Diana, looking for her in a forest, war, war, war, did he go to war?, woods, happy ending? I just could not connect his ideas together. Why start off a poem as a man jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge and then talk about a woman named Diana and her flowerlike face?

I really want to love poetry. After all, I love song lyrics and that is a form of poetry. I like catchy lingos, which usually rhyme –poetry. I like cute love notes and rude variations of “Roses are red…” But I cannot get myself to love classical (or modern) published poetry because that goes beyond my area of understanding. I see it as a visit to an art museum. I’ve been to MoMA plenty of times but every time I’d visit, I’d never be the one to stare at a painting of two brush strokes and interpret it as a rebellious but artistic emotion of a goldfish or any other analytical interpretation artists and museum regulars do. I just see two colorful brush strokes and I like the colors of it but I cannot see any emotion behind it. This is the same with poems—if it’s simple, I’ll most likely get the point if it is mostly made up of fancy and ambiguous text and phrases I will give up within seconds.

I really want to love poetry and most importantly, I want to read it and understand it. I don’t want to be bitter when it comes to this area of literature. Hopefully, the exposure I receive of it in this class will open my mind up a bit and I will develop a positive impression of poetry throughout the course.