Reflections on Poetry

    I remember first hearing that we would study poetry in this class a few months ago. My interlocutor made a passing reference to the fact that we have to study poetry in a literature class and implied that poetry was something to be dreaded. I immediately forgot his words until, today, February 17th, when I have to write a blog post about the topic of poetry. I think that this short anecdote describes my experience with poetry for the last decade (my memory is unreliable any further back) - I hear or see something related to poetry, briefly remember it exists, and return to the state of never thinking about it until I see something else tangentially related to poetry a few weeks or months later. This attitude towards poetry seems to be the most common in the modern cultural mainstream, with the belief that poetry is outdated or pretentious a close second, in my experience. 

This was the first image that popped up on Google Images

when I searched "poet"

   The Brain Pickings article introduced the concept of "resisting poetry to me". I obviously had not thought enough about poetry to resist it, but even though I am not "resistant" to poetry (my favorite poem is Invictus), I didn't believe that the article made very convincing arguments in favor of poetry. It seemed to focus on abstract truths such as poetry's age and similarity to science that could be interpreted as the "intellectual and obscure" reasoning by critics of poetry. 

    I think that resistance to poetry stems from a fixation on completely understanding the poem instead of simply dropping the mental analysis and experiencing the poem. I think that people in general tend to dislike things that require mental effort that they don't immediately understand. When I was searching for my mentor poet, I experienced my first emotional reaction from poetry in a long time when I read the lines:

        Don't be afraid, the gunfire

        is only the sound of people

        trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,

  These lines reinforced the message of the assigned reading - poetry can uniquely convey meaning and emotion in ways that prose cannot. I'm not going to pretend that this class has made me into a poetry enthusiast who will be attending poem readings and conventions on the weekends, but perhaps I have gained some appreciation and understanding of the oldest art form in human history, at least until I forget it exists again after the unit ends.