The Problem with Poetry

Note:  I am not a published poet, though hopefully I will be, someday.  These are just my thoughts on what good poetry is and what it should not be.

Okay.  I took a poetry writing class in college with Dr. David Craig–quite a brilliant man, by the way, and hilarious– and I learned something.  (Surprise!)

Poetry is work, damn it.  You cannot just throw words together and call them a poem, which is what many people do (and I used to do).  This:

My heart

is bleeding at your feet

and I cannot

breathe.

Life.

Death.

Hopelessness.

By:  Hopefully nobody.

Is not a poem.  It is a cliché image scattered over an open space.  I am guilty of doing this (though not to the degree of the above example).  So are many beginning poets, I think.  And there’s nothing wrong with starting somewhere.  An excellent poem may come from an exercise where you just write random words and images.  But that initial rambling should not be your final work.

While taking the poetry class, I had to revise each poem at least seven times for my final.  And let me tell you, they had changed a lot by the time those revisions were done.  There were times I would go to revise a poem and think:  “How can I possibly revise this masterpiece?  It’s perfection!  I’m frickin’ T.S. Eliot!”

Dr. Craig would then kindly stick a pin in my ego, and I would quite rapidly deflate and scuttle back to my keyboard.

So what is the problem with poetry?  People think it’s easy.  They think it’s just jotting down haphazard thoughts and cutting them to pieces to form shorter lines and stanzas.  But it’s so much more than that.  It’s dissecting those words and trying to figure out what you’re really trying to say, then completely changing everything.  Over and over again.  Sometimes you may not need many revisions, but most of the time the poem will unrecognizable from what it began as.

And that, my friend, is a good thing.