Bibliofreakblog

Free Verse Friday: I Finally Found a Meme I Like

Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy reading other people’s meme posts.  I just haven’t ever found one I wanted to participate in.

The ironical thing about this, however, is that I don’t really like poetry any more.

All through my adolescence I wrote poetry.  When I was a senior in high school, I was on my school’s poetry slam team and we went to the National Teen Poetry Slam.  I had a zine, which published more poetry than anything else, and I was president of my school’s writing club, Writers’ Block.

But then once I reached college, I pretty much stopped writing poetry.  Part of that was growing up.  Part of that was a shift to focus on fiction writing.  Part of it was not having a writers’ group any more.

Sure, I took a few college classes on writing poetry, but I no longer cared about it.

The other day I was thinking about it while I was at Seattle Bookfest, and noticed how I automatically turn away from books of poetry.  In fact, there is little that depresses me more than a poetry chap book.

And yet, when Cara from Ooh…Books started talking about creating a meme all about poetry, I was interested.  The fact is, there is good–great even–poetry out there.  I just don’t want to read a whole book of it.  

I guess I find it to be tedious, and poets to by stereotypically pretentious (seriously, I looked in on the teen poetry panel at the Seattle Bookfest and the “adult” leading it was a guy in his late twenties, wearing khakis, a dress shirt over a t-shirt with the arms rolled up, Airwalks–or possibly sketchers–shaggy hair with a backwards cabby hat and thick black glasses; I quickly left, laughing under my breath).  

My annoyance is probably due, to some extent at least, from the “word salad” culture of poetry and song lyrics I grew up  in in the 1990’s, and the Emo-based songs and poetry in the last decade.  I mean, OMG, how many poems have I written, and praised that other people have written, that while they sound nice, have splashy images and viceral phrases, don’t mean shit?  I mean, REALLY, don’t mean anything at all.  They go on for three pages and don’t say a damn thing.

Of course, I hate abstract modern art, too.

If nobody can figure out what the writer is trying to say, and the writer stays strangely silent on the subject (or uses a mish-mash of hifalutin terms that STILL do not make plain the poem’s purpose), what the hell is the point?

Blech.

But, O.K., like I said, there are good poems out there.  And featuring one a week is probably O.K. for me.  I’m just going to have to wade through the mire to find them.  It’s kind of like going to a thrift shop and finding something that doesn’t smell.  So, we’ll see how far I get with this before I can’t stand it any more.  So, I’ll be featuring some classics and some modern poetry, and maybe even some stuff that I wrote that I can still tolerate.

We’ll see how many weeks this lasts.

And no, I’m not going to feature anything this week.  This was enough.

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