As you can probably guess, with revisions and editing of the Poem-a-Week poems going on, I will not be writing much new stuff. I think that it is neat to look back and see what I wrote a year ago--until I get bored with it. Then, it is not so fun. The first poem from last year, posted somewhere around February 1st, was a nod to William Butler Yeats attitude toward the general reader of poetry. He felt, like T. S. Eliot would later on, that the average person trying to read poetry often dismissed it as the arcane broodings of druids and witches because the average person does not see the poetry in her life and thinks that it comes from some mysterious place. I tend to agree that people don't "get" poetry much anymore, but for very different reasons than either of those two gentlemen.
I believe that modern average readers, who consume pop novels and other prose by the volumes, have been led to believe that poetry is difficult and obscure through their associations with nearly a hundred years of very bad poetry. Thus, they have sought poetry in other forms rather than the forms that have been foist upon them by terrible high school teachers of literature and even worse college instructors, who truly believe that they are the gatekeepers of the arcane and unknowable, like pop music and the lyrics of songwriters like The Beatles and Taylor Swift. If you have been forced to read much of Walt Whitman or any of the 20th century free verse American poets, you know what I mean. You might have said, "I just don't get this. Is this really poetry?" Well, don't worry! It was not worth getting if you have to say that. Are all of our 20th and 21st century poets bad? No! But we have so much access to the bad stuff that it is hard to sort through all the crap to get to the good stuff.
Thus, you find my agreement with Yeats. Good poetry does seem magical because it is so hard to find. However, if you keep looking for it in the wrong place, you will end like the "fool" that I write about in the poem below.
If you go back and look at this poem a year ago, you will see that I have not changed much of it. I started to alter the meter to a strictly iambic meter through changing some words and numbers of syllables, but then I thought, "No, let's just go with the sound." Read this poem aloud and see if you can hear the rhythm created by the words. ENJOY!
Unpopular Notions of Poetry
(In agreement with Yeats)
A fool, within his empty mind,
Finds learning a mystery
And feels that simple truth and facts
Are complex conspiracy.
He also thinks that nothing’s real
Except what prophets see,
But who’s a seer and who’s a liar
Is based on his degree.
The dolt is stumped by the arcane
But swears it’s what he believes
While he and obscure ritual
Remain as thick as thieves.
And last, he likens poetry
To altering spells of a witch,
While poets themselves always maintain
They can’t change the dumb son-of-a-bitch.
Later, folks!
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