I hate poetry!!!

I think most people do.

It irritates me.

Smug little rhymes.

Pretence and aspirations.

Fluffy subjects like flowers and romance.

or the classics. Sorry The Classics.

Poetry was sold as clever

something highbrow

we just never got it

before it had a chance

We don’t mind song lyrics

in fact we admire them

They rhyme

have structure and form.

We don’t like poetry

because we haven’t found the Poetry

that we like.

Thats why we hate poetry.

©Grant N Stone 2020

The above rings true. Poetry doesn’t have to be daffodils or the Ilyad. In my view poetry is about creating an image, a scene, a story that is in the most minimal format to allow the reader to own their own version.

Longwinded descriptions of a squalid slum may take 10 pages for Dickens whereas Bukowski can nail it down in a couple of sparse lines.

Ogden Nash sums this up in “Very like a whale” a critique of  poetry and writing where he makes the plea that “one thing that literature would be better for/would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor”

Poetry is a broad church. Like painting and music. It’s not designed to be a one size fits all. Tales of love, war, adventure and tedium. Ornate and illustrated or sparse and minimal. Some strictly structured, some free from the constraints of grammar, style or even standard language.

To paraphrase the great Otis Gibbs who states at the beginning of his fantastic podcast “thanks for giving a Damn” there are only two people in art that really matter. That is the creative individual and the person experiencing it ”

“The rest is creative filters” he adds.

That is so relevant to poetry you take a couple of lines and you interpret them. Make them yours. The creative individual knew what they meant and whet they were expressing but to you the experience should be unique.

A two way interaction separated by years, by distance and by life experiences.

The rest is irrelevant. If you dont like it maybe ask your self why? If you do then ask yourself why. 

It doesn’t have to be even the whole thing. One stanza may be all you need or are receptive to. It could just be couple of lines. How much of Shakespeares is quoted in minimal format of a line or two.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown“

The creative individual (Shakespeare; Henry IV part 2. Act 3, Scene 1) wrote this in the late 1560s. Does this apply to just Henry? Or can this can be experienced by you today and interpreted to your current world. Or that of another. What I read and experience may be  different to what you read and experience. 

Hopefully the point is made that we don’t hate poetry, we hate what we think of as poetry.

For me the gateway drug to appreciation was through Charles Bukowski. If anybody ripped through the lace curtains and smashed the china tea set it was him. (I think the Shakespeare lines above could be the start of a Bukowski poem).

Charles Bukowski, The Laughing Heart