But I don't feel anything from poetry.
I've described it as like being tone-deaf but to poetry. The majority of poems make me feel nothing, and the ones where I do feel something is more because of the story than because it's in the form of a poem. I think that for the poems I do feel an emotional response to, I could experience the same emotional response without the form of the poem as long as the same story was there.
One of the few poems I felt an emotional response towards was Shel Silverstein's "Masks" that I read as a kid. It was a short poem and I think I responded to it because of the story it told, and not necessarily because of the form.
I wonder if you feel similarly. Do you feel something towards poems that tell a compelling story or do you never feel any emotional response to anything written in the form of a poem?
I've been punched in the gut by a story but yea, not a thing from a poem. Not ever. Maybe a good monologue in a movie, sure, but not because of the poetry of it, just the acting.
If you really want to be 'moved', don't bother with any poem less than 200 years old.
The poems that remain after 300 years are even better... Unfortunately, you start running into problems in that more work is put into deciphering the archaic English than enjoying the ideas expressed.
The point is, 99.9% of modern poetry sucks. It's not you.
I don't believe that that's what's going on here. The majority of all poetry sucks. As does the majority of all music, novels, paintings etc.
But the ones that don't suck persist. That's why it seems that older poetry is better, because we've forgotten/ignored the dross.
This tendency has been exacerbated in some fields by the split between art for marketing purposes and art for commercial purposes. But that hasn't really affected poetry, most of it's poor because most poets aren't very good.
I was involved in a project to create an anthology of poems. I spent much time reviewing previous anthologies, published in the 1800s, of 'contemporary' poems... that is, the books contained the best poems written during the period the book was published.
And, the verdict? The overwhelming bulk of the poems were terrible.
Just curious. Do you find some combination of words more "beautiful" then other combination of words that says more or less the same thing?
For example "I wandered lonely as a cloud" vs "I wandered alone, like a cloud".
I feel no difference between your two phrases, but the editor in me is triggered to think "should've wrote 'i wandered like a cloud.'"
I can think of specific writing that really worked for me. Peter Watts for example described the passing of one spaceship "under" a blacked out space station, describing how the only thing the astronauts could see were surfaces lit up by their own ship's thruster fire, behind them, casting long shadows ahead. I liked that.
Thought thunk this before, and here we are again. An identity function, an old familiar friend.
Thought thunk this before, and here we are again. A rhythm repeating, the beginning and the end.
Last year, I started listening to a Spanish rock band called Extremoduro (Spanish is my native language). I was captivated by the lyrics, I loved how the songwriter mixed delicate phrases with shocking and sometimes even impudent language. Robe, the singer & songwriter said:
>Bueno, yo me reivindico más como poeta porque lo que más quiero ser es poeta. Hacer una música, bueno, sí, está bien, pero hacer una letra para mí es mucho más difícil, es donde está una canción".
>(I claim myself as a poet, because being a poet is what I want the most. Making music, well, it's alright, but writing lyrics, for me, is much harder, because the lyrics is what makes the song).
This band alone has triggered an unsuspected interest in poetry for me.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is that most people have very particular taste in poetry. (So particular that some people might never discover their own!) It doesn't help that there is a lot of bad poetry out there, as well as poetry that might be good in some superficial "academic" sense, like you described, but doesn't produce any reaction in the reader.
There's also the fact that reading poetry is so different from reading regular prose, and it can take some getting used to. It took me several re-readings before poems that I now love first started to "click."
For me, it all started with discovering Nabokov's novels last summer -- his writing sparked an appreciation of prose and imagery that I never experienced before, despite being a lifetime reader. I read that he loved Keats, so I picked a few of Keats's best-known poems and read them over and over, until I internalized them and eventually came to love them. As I've explored other poets, I find that the more I read, the more I become sensitive to. But still, I'd say that 80% of the poetry I encounter (especially modern stuff) leaves me feeling stupid and insensitive, at least after the first couple readings. Better than the 99% a year ago, though!
EDIT: I went through something similar with classical music a couple years ago. Despite being a musician and music lover, I could just never get into it. I immersed myself in it for a few months and began to see/feel the beauty in it. I think it's just a very different way of approaching music compared to modern genres and structures, kind of like how poetry is fundamentally different from the novels most of us grow up reading.
However, this classification sort of breaks down the walls of poetry, since many poems are ostensibly divergent i.e. arbitrary and pretentious. At the same time, many mediums (visual, aural, kinesthetic) can be "poetic" without having anything to do with literal poetry. Is there a better word to describe this quality? For example, I don't care for poetry as far as it is a category of written works, but I really like those lines that Keats wrote down.
I'm surely missing some great stuff, but I support your feeling of not getting it.
Some performances lasted for hours (there being no Internet to distract anyone.)
The tradition started changing when poetry started to be written and published - by hand, initially - and then, as you say, it changed again when the printing press made it easy to distribute.
But it's worth remembering that it's basically an oral performance art, not just something to be read.
Live, it's a completely different experience, and can be far more powerful.
Cann't right now think of anything I know by a proper poet in English, but consider for example Leonard Cohen's
The Maestro says it's Mozart
But it sounds like bubble gum
When you're waiting
For the miracle, for the miracle to come
How much did he tell you in just those 4 lines? More importantly, have ever noticed the particular phenomenon described here? Now you have it in words, and you'll be able to notice it next time. I don't mean you specifically here, but just to convey the point.
That's poetry to me, not so much about "emotion", just noticing and expressing somewhat subtle facets of life. Because at the time this was written this was not a particularly new or subtle insight, that wasn't "true" poetry. Still a good song though.
You'd be wrong. "Geometry" is a highly respected poem of (Pulitzer Prize winning, Poetry laureate) Dove's. (Only the first stanza is quoted in the article). It has been extensively analysed, incorporated into various poetry syllabi around the world, and reprinted dozens if not hundreds of times.
It's quite one thing to say that you don't understand a poem, or you don't like it, or you prefer songs to poetry. But try not to hold court on what is or isn't 'considered' good poetry by people who enjoy poetry qua poetry.
> I thought it was clear that I was expressing my own opinion
I didn't get that sorry. When you said "I don't think [it] would be considered a good poem", it sounded like you were using a passive modal verb to suggest universality.
If it was intended as personal, I withdraw the rest of my comment.
> Also, windows and transparent walls as artistic device in a 21st century poem?
Since you've offered me the opportunity of being gloriously pedantic :) I can't resist saying that it was written in 1980. (Of course, that makes no difference to your opinion, I understand.)
When were transparent walls a suitable artistic device?
But seriously. To begin, the whole construct of comparing theoretical discovery to "seeing new things" is very old. Take Newton's famous "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." That actually is late 17th, although wikipedia says it could be even from the 12th, [1]. The windows probably have been used metaphorically even before that, but to be on the safe side, google ngrams finds them before 1900, [2]. Don't see much numbers about actual transparent walls, but a "glass ceiling" was used metaphorically as early as 1848, [3]. Thats remarkable on its own, although thats a different metaphor. Literal uses are even earlier.
Anyway, the point is cliche alert went off right at that first stanza.
There's a deeper problem, though. And that is that "proving" a theorem is not the thing that enables one to see. Proving is typically a rather mundane process, once one knows what one wants to prove. Take Pythagorean theorem even. Once one can formulate it, its not really hard to prove. But coming up with the notion that that is a thing that could be right, thats more difficult, thats the moment of "seeing". Its a bit of a simplification, but its mostly the discovery of new formulations that drives mathematics, not proofs. And so, the opening "I proved a theorem and then whooaaa..." is quite ridiculous.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g...
[2] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=window+on+the+...
[3] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=glass+ceiling&...
I have a baseless conviction though that it's a combination of 1. unavailability and 2. pop tastes.
On 1: If I spent 10 hours reading random (short) poetry I'm absolutely sure I'd find something that clicked, but there's no place I'm aware of where you can read a selection of poetry like that (unlike youtube and bandcamp, where I can choose from a thousand songs in a thousand genres in seconds). At best there's old php sites where the shallowest dabblers upload. And there's no ambient exposure, like when you walk by a radio or hear something nice in an advertisement.
On 2: No studies, but there's a lot of discussion about the popularity of free verse (what you'll mostly find on the above sites), decline of meter, rhyme patterns, etc. So even when I spend an hour trying to read here and there, that's all I got.
You'll find a decent amount of fantasy verse in books and games, although I'm not sure how well it stands on its own. Maybe there's other fields where poetry can spontaneously occur? Grad school whiteboards?
I also find it somewhat difficult to get into poetry. I don't know why I've been so patient with it. Maybe it's because I was never in a position of being expected to "get" it like you were.
As for what makes me like a poem, it's similar to what makes me like a song. I'll find myself repeating some small phrases of the poem to myself because I like them so much. Personally, I think listening to people read poems was what helped to convince me that there's something valuable in poetic language. I know there's a bit of elitism about wanting to hear something read to you instead of reading it yourself, but I'm sure Greek rhapsodes didn't feel the same way about reciting The Odyssey.
Those four simple words are funny and beautiful, simultaneously absurd and reasonable. To me this is poetry. Elegance, in the mathematical sense, only the problem space is describing things, rather than proving them.
Rather than not "getting" poetry, I think you can settle for simply arguing that it isn't poetry, or that you don't like it. Surely though, with a degree in creative writing, you've found something to be poetic.
I'm mostly interested in iambic pentameter and heptameter: Shakespeare, Spenser, Arthur Golding, George Chapman, Milton, Tennyson, etc. I can't say that I understand a lot of modern, unstructured poetry yet.
The use of language is usually more interesting than the meanings of the poems for me (with the exception of a few, like Wilfred Owen). Memorizing a lot of poems creates mental structures of rhythms and sounds that are kind of like templates that your thoughts can fill, and they echo in my head for a long time afterwards.
I have to sometimes force myself not to pick up a poetry book, because it's so interesting that it can distract me from other things. Before that, poetry didn't interest me or make much sense.
I've talked to my peers about this, tried to "get it." It's something wrong with me, I'm not trying to come across as if I'm the only one seeing through the emperor's clothing here. But, this first poem in the article for example (by the way, copy-pasting from this website is a fucking nightmare)
>I prove a theorem and the house expands: the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling, the ceiling floats away with a sigh.
I can appreciate a clever use of vocabulary, the choice of breathing words like "expand, hover, float, sigh" centered around the fulcrum of "jerk." Academically I get why it's a good poem. But I feel nothing towards it, it doesn't seem special to me, to the point that it seems even unnecessary.
Maybe someone else is here that used to be as cynical and boring as me and somehow has since "gotten" this art form that people have been playing around with for a couple thousand years, and is willing to share how they did it?
EDIT: I'm remembering specific incidents now, like of sitting around on a grassy hill on campus, smoking pot, while my peers read their favorite poems to eachother, everyone's nodding their heads, but I'm just not fucking getting it!
>As a professor, she used poetry in her mathematics classes to help students to connect emotionally to mathematics...
how???