You’d be hard-pressed to come up with an artsy-creativey thing I don’t like at least a little. One of my deepest, darkest secrets is that I have even enjoyed mime performances.
… you’re still with me? Whew. Good.
In the whole wide world of Things People Make, I have a soft spot for poetry. Really? Poetry, you say, seriously? In this snarky, plainspoken world – poetry?
Poetry has a reputation of being obscure and ornate and pretentious and boring. A club with an outdated dress code, bland food and a ridiculous entry fee. Sometimes this reputation is fair. There are a lot of poetry writers who are more impressed with their terribly important ideas than their audience. Some want you to battle through a impenetrable thicket of words before you get a glimmer of the point. Some try their hardest never to actually say anything that would give away that point at all, apparently thinking the entire aim of poetry is to be as mysterious as possible. “Oh, my poem just confused you? You don’t get it? Sweet! I win!” Some are mostly about their black blood and bottomless woe and piercing love and endless night. Gag. Some poems are just boring.
What is rarely acknowledge is that THOSE ARE BAD POEMS.
They’re just bad, guys. You didn’t like it because it sucked. You can say so. It’s okay.
There’s sort of a taboo among people who claim to like poetry against saying that any poem is objectively bad. But seriously, there’s a lot of utter crap out there. Think of all the horrible movies you’ve seen – including some that your friends told you were great. I bet you still go to the movie theater, though! I suspect some people who claim they “don’t get poetry” are actually better judges of good writing than a lot of people who indiscriminately love poetry; the scoffers just don’t realize they’re allowed to say, “Yeah, that’s lame,” and move on to something they would like.
Because guys, there’s a lot of incredible poetry out there too.
At the base of it, I believe poetry is simply joy in language. Anyone who’s ever had a favorite word, or repeated a phrase to the point that it stops having meaning and becomes pure music, has the ability to enjoy (good) poems! And there’s further joys in poetry that echo other arts – in the perfect encapsulation of a single moment, like photography; in telling a story, like movies; in the capture of the rarely understood human-beast; in simply being alive to bear witness to it all.
April is National Poetry Month. Just for the fun of it, I’m going to share a few of my favorite poems. It’s an odd collection, with no real organization – tending towards the well-known, contemporary and short, but that’s more like guidelines than rules, and I make no excuses for my taste. Enjoy, kids!
Against Entropy
The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.
— John M. Ford
Three-Quarters True 