The truth is (and I know this may be viewed as blasphemous by some), I hate poetry. Hate it. It bores me and gives me visions of pretentious high school and undergraduate students. Even the so-called good stuff irritates me.
Or maybe it's just that I don't "get" poetry.
I have a theory that most people don't get poetry. They just pretend to in order to sound deep and smart.
Much like the people who claim to enjoy the film "Lost in Translation."
6 comments:
There is some really good poetry--read William Blake or Shakespeare.
e.e. cummings is pretty good too
The problem is that there is a ton of dreck.
Here's some snappy verse from Alexander Pope:
"A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring
These shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
And drinking largely sobers us again."
Ozymandias (by Shelley) is a good one too.
I LOVE "Lost in Translation." I watch it when I miss living in Japan. Sophia Coppola really nailed it.
Do you like Pablo Neruda?
From – Twenty Poems of Love
By Pablo Neruda
I can write the saddest lines tonight.
Write for example: ‘The night is fractured
and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance’
The night wind turns in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest lines tonight.
I loved her, sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like these I held her in my arms.
I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes.
I can write the saddest lines tonight.
To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her.
Hear the vast night, vaster without her.
Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass.
What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her.
The night is fractured and she is not with me.
That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off,
my soul is not content to have lost her.
As though to reach her, my sight looks for her.
My heart looks for her: she is not with me
The same night whitens, in the same branches.
We, from that time, we are not the same.
I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her.
Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes.
I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her.
Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.
Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms,
my soul is not content to have lost her.
Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer, and these are the last lines I will write for her.
Lost in Translation is the stupidest movie in the history of time. Now the American Pie trilogy - THERE'S some quality theater!
Seriously, if the movie makes my brain hurt, I don't care for it. If it makes my belly hurt from laughing - that's my kind of film.
Our lives in the law are too stressful and serious and self-righteous and intellectual. Why would I want to watch that on a movie screen to help me relax?
oh man,
if i have to work to read it, then forget it.
peotry = work, lots of it.
title 28-1381(a)(1) of the vehicle code = work, lots of it, but i get paid for that.
i read for fun. comic books and graphic novels are my favorites.
after that books with small words and simple sentences.
The intellectualism of John Lillison, England's One-Armed-Poet-Laureate, is too much for me, personally:
"Oh pointy bird, oh pointy pointy,
Anoint my head, anointy nointy."
I mean, really, the obvious soviet realist critique of capitalism's 'pointedness' and the subsequent discussion of proletarian consumerism seeking to be 'anointed' (note the critical attitude toward religion!) at the baptismal font of mass-production and the (self-contained) implicit wish for deification (as opposed to class reification) in the post-industrial, post-modern zeitgeist tends towards a self-deconstructionist gestalt within the tonality, meter and rhyme-scheme of the couplet, revealing at once a satirical attitude toward socialist poetical criticism and a sort of sentimentality directed at Elizabethan utility of the iambic pentameter.
Honestly, who but egghead intellectuals could find anything but crass wordiness in a poem like that?
What about listening to poetry?
I'm really not into sitting and reading the stuff, but some makes sense if I hear it. Which is odd, given how visually oriented I otherwise am.
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