Think You “Hate” Poetry?

Why Do You Hate Poetry?

I have not read this book, yet – I just bought it on the strength of an article in The Atlantic, “Why Do Some People Hate Poetry?” by Adam Kirsch.

My own theory has been that people don’t hate poetry at all – they hate bad poetry. Pompous, pretentious, precious poetry. Unfathomably deep metaphors. Tongue-twisting, time-traveling language and syntax. Contrivance. But they lack the self-confidence, or feel it would be too rude or too harsh to say, “I have no idea what this means, and it’s such a chore to read it that I no longer care to contemplate it.” The fault may lie with the poet, not the reader.

Is There Such a Thing as “Bad Poetry”?

Oscar Wilde claimed that “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” In “The best bad poetry out there,” Dan Chiasson writes of a 1930s anthology of bad poetry called, The Stuffed Owl, that “Excess of love often leads, in poetry as in life, to worse results than neglect. Most of the worst bad poems here are so fragrantly and moistly loved that our supercilious amusement at them seems savage.”

But I would suggest to the reader that there are many poets and many poems – far too many to be read by one person in one lifetime. If you’ve attempted to make heads or tails of several poems by one poet, find another. All poets can be a little hit-or-miss. And readers’ tastes vary. There’s nothing wrong with that, or with you, Dear Reader. I may write one poem that truly touches another soul, and the next will, quite frankly, suck. I am glad of PCs and pixels; if I were still feeding dead trees to a wastebasket every time I wrote something bad or barely adequate, I would feel an unrelenting guilt. God forbid I should turn you off poetry altogether.

Does Poetry Leave You Feeling “Stupid”?

There’s something between “deep” and “doggerel” and I aspire to find my happy place on that spectrum. A poet might make more money writing “greeting card verse,” and might have more admirers writing overly “deep” navel-gazing verse full of symbolism nobody really understands – in the same way that the naked Emporer had “admirers” who were too terrified of him to tell him the truth.

Honestly, I don’t understand every word of “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot, either. But if you listen to him read it, himself, a few times, if you think about it, and read what’s been written about it so that you understand the references in context, it becomes clearer. A young adult in 2023 does not share some of the specific experiences that Eliot talks about. A little more effort is required of us, today, than might have been required by the reader who lived through World War I. That effort pays off, I think. Keep in mind that poetry is meant to be read aloud and heard, because it is naturally metrical, lyrical – it was never meant to be solely for the eyes and brain.

Now compare the author’s own reading of it to that of Fiona Shaw: Fiona Shaw The Waste Land by T.S – YouTube

Listen, too, to Maya Angelou, performing her famous poem, “Still I Rise”:

Now, find yourself a favorite poem and try reading it aloud. Get someone else to read it aloud. See if you can find a recording of the author reading it out loud. It may be impolite of me to say this, but I think Fiona Shaw performed Eliot’s poem better than he did! I’m not sure anyone can perform Maya Angelou’s better than she did, though!