I have never heard from another writer that he/she doesn’t like poetry. Frankly, I haven’t met that many people who openly admit that they don’t like poetry either. This may make me look bad, but it is OK. I’ve always been honest with you. Here it is: I don’t enjoy poetry. And I really tried to like it.
Right from elementary school, my teachers pushed poetry as the noblest medium. From middle school and onwards, I had the chance to read many, many poems by a diversity of poets, in very different styles and I just couldn’t enjoy it. They just didn’t resonate with me.
For some reason, poetry never sounded natural to me. I always sensed a touch of pretense, the desire to show life more painful than it had to be, the desire to sound profound and educated and charismatic rather than sincere and heartfelt.
I am not saying the poets who wrote those poems weren’t sincere. I’m however saying that they did feel artificial to me, and after all, whether or not you like something mostly (if not entirely) depends on how it makes you feel.
I have never been a fan of short stories either. For me, a story just doesn’t end in a couple of pages. I know there are a lot of different kinds and word counts and styles, but the effect for me is the same. I don’t get to know the characters enough, I don’t have the time or the opportunity to get to care about them. As a result, I end up forgetting all about it. Best case scenario, I remember how powerful the idea was. But I still have a million questions in my head about characters, the backgrounds, the motives. Not that all questions should be answered, but I’d like to have at least a couple answered.
I’m in no way looking down on these genres or lacking respect towards them. I am just saying that with so many flavors the tea comes in, I just don’t enjoy them all.
How do you feel? And it is completely OK if you always felt close to some or all types of writing. Feel free to share what kind of writing you feel the closest to and why.
I have written poetry for forty years. There is an assumption that many people make when you say you write poetry that you like all poetry but I can assure you that that is not the case. I actually dislike more poetry than I like. And the stuff I hate the most is, like you say, those poets who don’t sound natural. Some people have a telephone voice and some writers have a poetry voice. The majority of the poetry I come across online is dire. The problem is most people don’t know enough about poetry to know what’s bad and what’s not. It’s a case of The Emperor’s New Clothes. They lack the confidence to say, “That’s shite.” In the old days when poetry was a form of writing it was far easier to say what a good poem was; it was one that conveyed its message within the given rules. There are no more rules. They’ve all been broken. So how do we judge poetry nowadays? I saw a video online a while back in which some eighty poets tried to answer the simple question, ‘What is poetry?’ and some of their answers were laughable.
Like the rest of us I was force-fed poetry at school: Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, John Masefield and very little of it reached me. I couldn’t relate to most of it. And I didn’t appreciate the heightened speech either. Okay I was a bit young for most of it and I can see now, as an adult, why they were considered great poets but just because I can appreciate their skill doesn’t mean I’ve grown to love them because I haven’t.
And then I read ’Mr Bleaney’. Epiphanies are rare in this life but I had one of my first—perhaps my very first—when I read this poem. I’ve written about it many times. But this is what I said in a recent article (the one I’ve linked to):
The thing that struck me most about this piece was how unpoetic it is. Yes it rhymes and the lines have a regular ten-syllable beat—through when you read it you’d never know—but where are all the babbling books and burning tygers? There’s nothing pretty here or Romantic. And the only mention of anything resembling Nature in the piece is some building land and that’s littered. Up until then I have never imagined that poetry could deal with anything that wasn’t in some way idealised and . . . well, poeticised to death.
Larkin opened my eyes. And I began searching for more writers like him. What I found was that there aren’t many like him and the only way I was going to read the kind of poetry I wanted to was the write the damn stuff myself. You can read some of my stuff on my website. There is a school of poetry known as antipoetry (as exemplified by Nicanor Parra, i.e. “prose-like, irreverent, and illuminating the problems of human existence”) which I feel is a good fit for what I do although I only became aware of him recently. Parra reacted to the flowery poetry that was being produced in Spanish at the time. I think his stuff is a breath of fresh air. If you’ve never read Richard Brautigan’s poetry you should give him a go too.
As regards to you not caring for short stories I suspect that part of your problem here is one you also have with poetry: both forms require a greater commitment from the reader than, say, a novel. If you like filling in the blanks, using your imagination then there’s a lot to be enjoyed in shorter forms but, again, there are a lot of bad short stories out there too. It’s not a form I do a lot in. I wrote about fifty twelve years ago when I was stuck on a novel and have hardly written one since.
I don’t like opera. It frustrates me that I don’t because I love almost all classical music from Gregorian Chant right through to serial music. But I’ve never managed to sit through an entire opera. The odd aria is fine but that’s about me. Am I missing out? Of course but there is so much else out there; I’m discovering new composers every week. So you don’t like poetry. So what.
Hi, Jim. Thanks for the in-depth comment. Sorry for the late reply, but I was committing the ultimate writer sin, procrastination, while on holiday.
I am happy that you also feel free to say “so what” about tastes, and I am also learning to dig deeper and deeper into the genres. I realize that there’s so many gems that appeal to me. That I ended up liking so much of these genres and sub-genres that I decided to dig even more.
This counts for pretty much anything, from movies to literature.
For instance, for many years, I wasn’t a fan of the sci-fi genre. I never liked aliens (especially those who are depicted in the green, monster-like format), for instance. I never really liked endless hours of the adventures of a space crew. But then I watched Back to the Future, and fell in love with the idea of time travel, especially when told with humor. Then I noticed that I liked sci-fiction more if the themes were totally related to today’s world, and/or things that we’d (probably) do, had we have the technology. So gene-alteration, space travel, moon exploration….throw it my way, and I’ll check it out. More and more sci-fi movies are ending up on my favorite movies lists.
This goes for music, novels, stories, non-fiction, paintings…
But sometimes I do feel the occasional need to reach out and ask if I’m the only one, as a lot of people continue to be snobs, and consider their tastes absolute. They refuse to believe art is relative, and attack others for not feeling the same. Being passionate is one thing, being intolerant is another.
So I take a look, look further if it intrigues me and feel free to share my thoughts, in a non-insulting way, about the piece, whatever it might be.
I don’t like opera either, yet this one guy sang a really famous piece so well at a show, and it fit the mood and I really enjoyed it. I wouldn’t have had a good time if it was all opera, but that one song was one of my favorites that night.
I’m off to checking your links. Thanks for dropping by and please visit again.
“Behold the duck.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.
It is specially fond
Of a puddle or pond.
When it dines or sups,
It bottoms ups.”
–Ogden Nash
🙂
Ha ha. Although I have to ask: Is it for kids, meant to be funny and/or poking fun?
Because if it is one of the above, it is a good one…