Poetry

I don't get poetry.

Never have.

I'm not slamming poetry, or people who appreciate poetry. My best friend couldn't live without poetry. It flows through her veins and sustains her. Many bloggers I know are either poetry lovers and/or even poets themselves.

Not trying to denigrate them or the art form they love. Just saying I'm different and I fail to see the point of poetry.

I ran across a quote from the physicist Paul Dirac, who shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger. He sums up my feelings about poetry quite nicely.

"In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand.

In poetry you are bound to say...something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand."

Exactly!

If you have something to say, if there is something you want me to know, just tell me what it is! Don't make me guess, don't leave it up to my interpretation, don't cloak it and hide it in obtuse phrases. JUST FUCKING TELL ME!

Same goes for abstract art of any form. Anybody can sling paint on a canvas, stick it in a frame and hang it on a wall. As far as I'm concerned, all abstract art is one big Rorschach test. None of it has any objective meaning, everything is left up to the viewer to decide what it means. Which means it doesn't mean anything at all. It is meaningless. It has no content and therefore no relevance.

The purpose of this blog post is to express to the reader why poetry doesn't speak to me. In order to express my feelings, I choose my words very carefully. I go back and re-read what I have written. If I find parts of it to be vague or ambiguous, I will re-write those parts to make them more concise.

My goal is for the reader to come away with a clear understanding of the point I am trying to make. I write this way so as not to waste people's time by making them try and guess what I mean. It's a courtesy to the reader.

I apologize that I will not spawn an industry of critics and apologists who spend decades hunched over my scribblings and writing their own interpretations of what they feel I was trying to say.

Sorry to break your rice bowl Sparky, but I say what I mean. I don't need no stinkin' interpretation.