Friday, October 16, 2009

Rhymes with "wholly unfortunate"

I used to write poem-ly things when I was young. Once, I even took a poetry class. Unfortunately my poems were, in a word, terrible, and the poetry class didn't help even one iota. The whole "tree/Calvary/died for me" rhyming scheme worked well for the first 12 or so years of my life, and after that, I sort of latched onto the simple "rewind/mind/God is kind" type stuff that seemed like such brilliance.

But I just have no talent for poetry. Every time I look back on poems I considered to be so incredible or deep, I sort of want to burn them (which isn't unusual, I pretty much want to burn everything I've ever written). But sometimes I make myself try to write poetry, just to see if I've inadvertently gotten hit in the head with a poetry-laden 2x4. So far, just so you know, it hasn't happened. When I try to write poetry these days I just feel like being lazy and doing what every other modern poet does, which is to say, write completely random words.

Let me try a poem that would get a modern poet published in a magazine.

Tortilla Chips dreams
Frozen Vegetables drama
Wrinkled Paper fear
Antique Watch far from youth

Pretty much, that's what I see when I read poetry written in the past hundred years or so. What is wrong with at least attempting to put in cool-sounding lines, like things about "time yet for a hundred indecisions, and time for a hundred visions and revisions," sort of Thomas Stearns style? Not that T. S. Eliot bothered to rhyme much, but at least he had a natural cadence to his work, and at least some of his stuff rhymed, and at least he didn't write abstractly about plutonium and proms and sowing seeds of anger. When I look at modern poetry I realize that there's usually something to decipher (unlike my beautiful poem above, so seriously, don't bother trying to find a deep meaning between my tortilla chips and fear), but if I wanted to decipher something, I'd work on Hebrew, or do a logic puzzle, or try to read my dad's handwriting or something. There is no good reason for having to spend forever trying to figure out poetry.

Poetry is supposed to touch a chord inside of you. Reach something you didn't know you had. It's supposed to make you itch to say words or your own, jumbled masses of thoughts, strung together like music. But these days? You're counting blessings if the words are even masses of jumbledness, and finding things strung together is somewhat hopeless.

The tablecloth,
Sinks in the washer,
Under the weight of water,
and soap, and dirty socks.

Seriously, people get paid for that?

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