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At the risk of offending all sorts of people, I have a confession to make to my 10 loyal followers. Some people already know what I’m about to say, but it’s time I came out publicly: I don’t like poetry. Now I don’t want to drop the h-bomb here, but let’s just say that ‘don’t like,’ may be an understatement. Because there has been more than one occasion on which I’ve thought to myself, as a poem was being read or I was reading one somewhere, ‘man, this sucks.’ Actually, as long as so many others have said what I’ve been thinking all these years, I won’t hold back: I hate poetry. I don’t hate it in the snarling, teeth-gritting, preoccupied- with-hatred- (for poetry in this case) way a guard dog hates intruders. It just does nothing for me and so much of it is embarrassingly bad.



Think of all the readings you’ve had to sit through, all the self-proclaimed ‘poets’ who take themselves oh so seriously. And then there are those who are just dabbling in poetry and sincerely think they have talent because they can put together a few lines of free-verse-spoken-word schlock*. I wish I were a bird… How brown the leaves of autumn….

But before the all the aspiring poets, the published poets and those who simply enjoy reading it let their arrows fly (at my head, not my heart), I must put a positive spin on this, because though I try to write critically on this blog, I try not to write about anything on here unless there’s something positive about it. So then, in keeping with a recent theme on Write-Brained, the self-imposed challenge to at least read outside ‘my genre,’ whatever that is but I know it’s not poetry (yecch), I am going to start reading it, just a little bit. The other reason I want to start reading poetry is that I saw at least one person I know who is not a pretentious poetry hound (as opposed to my Creative Writing I professor) reading a book of poems by Rimbaud last night. (I, in my ignorance had thought Rimbaud was a philosopher, to which when I mentioned it to him, the down-to-earth reader I’m talking about smiled and said ‘there’s a fine line…’).

The younger, angstier me would have scoffed at that and thrown him in with all the other would-be poets in the coffee house or the student center. But in reading novels and short stories lately, and working on my own, I’ve recognized that well, even if its clean and/or economical, my prose sucks.


So while I don’t imagine I’m going to start lunging for the poetry section in bookstores and libraries as a result of this experiment, my goal will be to use poetry the way fighters and musicians and, I imagine, dancers, use their forms, their patterns and their exercises.If this experiment is successful, then the new, intensified focus on the language itself will strengthen my ability to create clear images with words, in ways that are more colorful, which will eventually spill over into the sentences and paragraphs and pages of prose I write to tell a story. So that if I stick to my diet of well-regarded (since I have no poetry preferences except that what I read not be written by undergraduate potheads) poems, when there’s a good opportunity to illustrate a scene with say, a metaphor, or when it’s time to come up with an interesting title or the name of a character, I won’t be at the kind of loss I am all too often.

To those who already like poetry, especially those who write it, I’m sure that even this concession to ‘use’ poetry, poetry as a device used to create more valuable ends than poetry itself (to write good novels, short stories, narrative nonfiction, etc.) is condescending. What can I say? It’s the best I can do.

*I’ve contributed to the genre in earnest, in the past, I admit, but not in public, out of mercy to anyone who knows how to read. My most recent work taken the form of obscene haiku’s texted back and forth with a friend.


dabbler, dilletante, haiku, iambic pentameter, lyric, meter, poems, poetry, pretentious, rimbaud, stanza, verse

March 9, 2011

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