I really don't understand poetry, I'm told i'm quite good at it. I dunno, I reckon people are just being nice. Just when I feel confident that i can do it I read something and it makes me think twice. I am going to enter a competition with something i wrote and i was on the website looking through it and came across last years winner. To be honest I was expecting something deep, to hit me intensely with the imagery created, perhaps cleverly constructed or beautiful words, like Shakespeare or Wordsworth, Perhaps dark like Edgar Allen Poe, you know? Something very very special.
What i was confronted with , last years winner, was set out in stanzas but could have been written as prose and indeed was read out as such. Poetry? Don't think so
So thats what I don't get, what defines a poem? Not rhyming, i know that. I can write rhyming and unrhymed poems, least i think i can.
I'm going to enter the competition still but haven't alot of hope, I don't get poetry at all. Never have. I do my version and hope people like it.
The main reason for this is basically school, I once had to write a poem about Funghi. I remembered this about ten minutes before the lesson on the bus on the way to school. I was crapping myself. The teacher was very strict and not averse to dishing out a bollocking.
So I wrote this poem in ten minutes, it was almost unintelligible so many crossings out and mistakes, places where the bumpiness of the trip affected the pen stroke. I finished it on the wall top going into school. I handed it in expecting a roasting.
Next lesson it was handed back to me with a complaint from the teacher that she could hardly read it. I looked at the grade A-.
The lesson consisted of us examining other poets and in their poetry what were they thinking to write their words.
I couldn't get past the thought that all i was thinking on the way to school was ;
'I gotta get this done or I'm toast'
Some how I doubt that any student studying my funghi poem would have nailed my true thoughts.
So when i read a poem that doesn't meet my criteria or even resemble a poem, I lose heart and can't believe jumped up judges who are so full of themselves that they see something so deep in something that isn't. Its like a pile of coke cans being called art. WTF?
Perhaps i am shallow, perhaps i don't get it at all after all these years. Does that make me wrong? I always look at poetry as being exceptionally personal and I guess you can call anything poetry. Me? I don't
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