101st Street. The Problem with Poetry

Why doesn’t one read a poem? Because
there are words I cannot understand.
Why doesn’t one read a poem? Because
it takes too long to reach the end.
Well, this is a poem, and it’s done.

As a student of English Literature, I see the importance of poetry and the status of it as being quintessential literature. The common misconception people have with Literature students is that they then to spend hours after hours reading poetry, and therefore, every student of literature is able to understand every single useless unintelligible poem out there in bookstores. Well, there are some amongst us who are really good with poetry; they are like structure detectives, able to pick out the imagery, the iambic beat and all the conventions guarding poetry as a discipline. Not me. I am able to appreciate poetry, but I am just not very good at handling the crazy array of imageries or structures.

It is without a doubt that poetry is falling out of favor with the reading public; not only do most people not read poems anymore, but poetry as a genre, does not sell. The novel as an art form takes over poetry as being the more accessible genre for most of the reading public. None of you should feel bad about this, for even for students of literature, we tend to want to read novels more than poems, other than a very, very few selected ones among us who has a fetish for poetry. One of the main difficulties when it comes to the genre of poetry is that it is an art form that is highly individualized. The poet writes about what he feels, what he sees, and what he thinks. The fact that very individual sees a certain thing differently it is especially hard to understand what the poet is EXACTLY seeing (or feeling) at the exact time of the writing of the poem.

At the same time, poems remain as one of the most succinct forms of writing today; no form is able to convey so much information in a very little amount of words. All it needs is really careful and slow reading of each poem to see the images the poet offers in his poem. That’s what poetry demands of you: very slow reading of each line, let each line sink into your consciousness. Given the fast paced mode of life we have today, can we really afford the time?

I would not say that this is the end of poems, I would say that poetry as a discipline is reincarnated into the modern forms of song lyrics. Yes, lyrics owe its form to poetry; each line of a lyric to a song has in itself its own rhythm that matches the musical tune of the composer. And rappers are the only singers these days who sings in rhyming couplets. See? All these are structures of poetry in a new, acceptable modernized form! Now, how about giving poetry its proper due?