The Book Pirate

It’s national poetry month and nobody told me. A couple of the blogs I read mentioned it here and there, but nobody said it loud enough to make it stick. Anyway, happy national poetry month!

I have a hard time talking about poetry in general because the subject matter is so subjective. When I took a poetry class in college I was surrounded by people who had been writing poetry for years. I, however, I had written only one poem in my entire 21 years leading up to that point. When we criticized poems they would see the puddle in the poem as being symbolic of confinement or mother nature or even God. When I talked about the puddle, I literally thought it was a puddle. It made sense in my mind. Mayhaps I am incapable of understanding the metaphors and whatnot that make up poetry.

One thing that bugs me about poetry is that I tend to read more bad poems than I do good ones. My theory in regards to bad poetry is that people often mistake it for good poetry because they do not understand it. Poetry is considered one of those “high class” art styles right? If we don’t understand it then it must be good. Seems like flawed logic to me. There are many bad poems out there. As soon as we come to terms with that the sooner we can learn from our mistakes.

Another thing I don’t understand about poetry is what is the point of having poems translated from one language to another? Say a poem was written in Spanish and translated to English. Is it the same poem? No, I do not think so. It is an entirely new poem inspired by the original.

That’s just my thoughts at least.

Poetry anyone?