Poetry: I just dont get it

[LSK]

:shrug:

[barb162]

1. are you kidding?

[LSK]

2. no

[Skittles]

4. I'm with you LSK

never could get into it

[Richardo]

17. Me three

Ogden Nash is about it for me.

[Skittles]

31. I actually have read poetry I have liked

I just don't seek it out

[Monk06]

9. Hey, Plato said poetry should be outlawed.

[bridgit]

3. roses are red, violets are blue, in some parts of town; 2 + 2 =

22 :-)

[khashka]

5. For God's sake

don't let RetroLounge hear you say that! You'll hurt his feelings!


Khash.

[Random_Australian]

6. I get people getting it but don't get it myself.

get get get!

[Alexodin]

7. Do you like song lyrics ? They are very much like poetry.

[Heidi]

8. Welcome to DU!

:hi:

[Alexodin]

10. Thank you !

I've been here a long time I just haven't posted much but was a lurkey lurkey turkey.

[Heidi]

11. Whoops! I didn't look at your profile

before welcoming you. Nice to see you posting! :hi:

[tjwmason]

12. I don't think that I've ever fully appreciated it.

I personally think it's because I'm very keen on music, and keen on prose and poetry hangs (for me) uneasily between the two.

I think that some of the highest human artistry has been achieved in poetry, but I'm afraid it's just not my cup of tea.

[HarukaTheTrophyWife]

13. There's poetry for everyone you just have to find it.

That being said, I'm a geek that goes to poetry events. Most of my poetry books are signed, provided the poet isn't dead.

[Mutley]

14. It's not for everyone.

Just like anything else.

[Ivan Sputnik]

15. What a poet said

POETRY

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against 'business documents and

school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
'literalists of
the imagination'--above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

--Marianne Moore

[Richardo]

18. See, I can't read that.

Really, I tried three times and fizzled out about 1/2 way. Blah blah blah.

[LSK]

24. same here

[tigereye]

26. ah, Moore!

very nice.


see I love poetry, even if I don't get it. That's why you have to keep re-reading it. Some of it you might never "get." It's just lovely the way the words and images roll over and over on your tongue and on the page. :)

[jukes]

16. if you don't get it

you're not going to. explanations won't help.

like being color-blind; not a dsability, but you're never going to "get" red....

[Rabrrrrrr]

19. I didn't "get it" until I was in my 30s.

Even though I'm an artist and writer, I ever "got" poetry. It seemed insipid and stupid to me.

Most poetry still does, because so much poetry (esp. the stuff that gets printed in obituaries, or in Reader's Digest, or in a wide variety of other not-very-professional situations, or gets read at weddings or funerals, etc.) is just fucking awful. Awful!

But, partly through Garrison Keiller sifting through the shit and finding GOOD poetry, I'm getting it, and it's also made a good impact on my own writing, being able to use metaphor and simile to much better effect and getting away from a purely objective and literal description to a more poetic one.

I'm still not a big fan of poetry in the sense of sitting down and reading a book of poems, but what the hell.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

20. I agree

Most of the stuff printed nowadays is absolute garbage.

[tigereye]

27. I can read Wallace Stevens a 1000 times

and still not totally get it, but it's still ok and wonderful. I feel like I have my whole lifetime to "get" it. Or not! ;)

[Bassic]

21. Well, it can happen.

It's like me and abstract art. :shrug: It all looks like something somebody coughed up to me.

[rug]

22. Don't get me started on opera.

[miss_american_pie]

23. To each his own

;)

[Roon]

25. Oh! Poems no less...

Little lad here makes himself to be a poet!

[tigereye]

28. I do think LSK

that eventually you may find a poet that you "get." But I'm a prose and poetry nut, so there you go.

[El Fuego]

29. It's like music, you either hear the melody, or it's just noise

if you are tone deaf.

[Orsino]

30. I didn't, much, for decades...

...even having been raised by two English teachers, one of whom became a Poet Laureate. I did learn to love words; I was just too literal-minded to appreciate things said in oblique ways.

I'm still not a great poetry fan, but some of it is moving and memorable. It can say, in a few words, what would take a lot longer with more precise language--in the same way, I guess, that a Swift/Colbert satire can skewer entire systems of government.

[wain]

32. Wish I did, but I don't.

Even took a course on poetry in college just to try to get it. The only think I got was a D-. My problem? I over-interpreted the crap out of everything!

I don't get opera either. Love classical music - the Messiah is my favorite.

:)