I am getting ready to admit something that I have been trying to deny for years. I don't get poetry. I don't. I read poems. I try to be cultured. I pretend to understand them. I try to see them with emotion and great insight. But I don't understand them.
My interactions with poetry began in junior high. At that point my best friend (Katie) and I were going to start a Christian rock band (we both attended a private Christian school, I read Contemporary Christian Music Magazine, my radio was always set to the Christian music station). We were so cool. Actually, she was cool, I wasn't. A girl in our class made a list of the popular people in our class, the normal people and the unpopular people. There were only two people on the unpopular list, and I was one of them. But I digress. Katie and I thought we were the salt to the world's french fries. Life would be so much better for everyone if only they could hear our music. The problem was we didn't have any music. We only had a concept. And that concept was that we wanted to be famous Christian singers (does that exist) and we wanted the name of our group to be True Peace (with our symbol being a circle with a cross in it...like a peace sign but not).
Next step: write songs. In moments of great passion I would take pen to paper and write out my intense teenage thoughts and feelings. 5 minutes later I would have my lyrics. All that was left to have a song was to write music! Then a problem arose. The only instrument that I played was the flute. Hmmm...that's not very rock star-ish. Katie played miniscule amounts of piano, so she would have to be the creative genius behind our music. As you can tell by the description of my song writing we were bound to fail. Between the two of us we were able to write part of one song (that thinking back was entirely written by Katie) and several horrible lyrics. I submitted one poem that I wrote for a literary scholarship and they said they couldn't give me money but they wanted to publish it...I still have no idea why that one was okay and the others weren't.
My next interactions with poetry were in college. I believed myself to be well read while in small town Ohio, but as I ventured out into the wide world of academia I realized that I was a small fish in a big pond and that I hadn't really read much. It was at this time that I met Jenna (someone who was, and still is, well read). Jenna was an English, pre-med major at our college. She took classes like "Emily Dickinson's Poems" (which inspired me to try to read the poems of Emily Dickinson...I saw something about a butterfly, a frog and a small bird, couldn't figure out what it actually meant and gave up) and "Contemporary Writers." I was always intrigued to find out about these classes, tried to be interested in the topics (I figured that all educated people should be interested in literature), but in the end could not wrap my mind around the information.
In an attempt to try to be plugged in to the literary scene at school I decided to purchase a copy of the literary magazine that was published yearly and contained essays and poems by students. I also purchased this item because Jenna had one of her poems chosen for the magazine. I still have that magazine sitting on my bookshelf next to my other unread books of poetry. I did read Jenna's poem - I thought it was pretty good (it was about doctors and I was a Biology major headed to medical school, so it clicked with me on that level). But I still didn't understand what made poetry good.
I remember that at about the same time that the literary magazine came out I sat down and talked to Jenna about how her poetry class was going. She had been under the assumption that poetry came during moments of frenzied, inspired writing (much like I attempted during my Christian rock band days in junior high), but her professor had explained that poetry was something that took time. It took many drafts. It is not something to be written in 5 minutes but something to be revised over the course of many sittings. I accepted this explanation because it made sense. People revise prose - why not poetry? Plus it gave me a way to rationalize (read cop out) about why my poetry wasn't any good (it's not that I'm not a good writer...it's that I didn't write enough drafts).
Since college I think I have written and kept one poem. I was bored in class one day (in a biology PhD program) and decided to write a satirical poem about my program. It wasn't eloquent. It didn't rhyme properly. It didn't have any kind of meter. But it was funny. For the first time in life other people really appreciated a poem that I wrote, so much so that it ended up on our class refrigerator. Also, interestingly enough, I wrote two drafts. The other poems that I have written since leaving college have been kind of embarrassing. I sit down thinking, "man, I should really write a poem." I write it (usually in 5 minutes with no second draft), read it, realize that it is bad and that I would be horrified if someone else actually read it. Then I proceed to destroy the evidence. First I scribble over the words (Why didn't I think to write this in pencil!). Then, since I am convinced that you can still see the words through the scribbles I write other random words over top of the scribbles and scribble over it again. Finally, the poem is torn up into tiny pieces and distributed into several trash cans.
I think my poetry days are over. Sometimes I see that someone has written a poem and posted it on facebook. Sometimes I read it, sometimes I don't, but I never know for sure if it's good or not. And I'm okay with that. I realize that I have other strengths (none of which would lend to the life of a Christian rock star).
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