STYLETHREAD -- LET'S TALK SHOP!

I cannot understand poetry, no matter how hard I try . I would love to love it, because it all sounds so beautiful, but I can't "get" it without someone helping me (unless it's blatantly obvious...). I, like you Lynnie, would consider myself bright-- I've always been above average in English skills like grammer and writing (though it may not be evident here )-- but I just can't understand it. Actually, I always thought I was the only one. I remember sitting there in English class while we were learning poetry and being silent, thinking "why can't I understand this when everyone else can?"

i think poetry is like those 3D pics that were popular years ago.  you know the ones that look like squiggles but there's a picture in there you're supposed to see if you look hard/long enough?

well poetry's like that, if you  just let your mind drift over the words and the images they evoke, you'll get something out of it but if you try too hard to "get to the bottom of it", so to speak, you may just give yourself a headache. 

oh here's my take on the subway poem, fwiw:

This luscious and impeccable fruit of life
Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.

life is so heavy and perfect it's own weight made it fall.

When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,
Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.

the first taste of life was sweet even though according to the poet life is really bitter/acrid

An apple serves as well as any skull

don't get the skull reference
To be the book in which to read a round,
And is as excellent, in that it is composed
Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.

both apples and skulls rot in the ground, apples if they're not picked up, skulls because they're buried when someone dies, still don't get the skull reference though.

But it excels in this, that as the fruit
Of love, it is a book too mad to read

hmm...the poet seems to have changed the fruit of life to the fruit of love, wonder why?

Before one merely reads to pass the time.

this reasonated w/ me--sometimes i think we analyze love and life and people and relationships just to pass the time, as a distraction, because in the end isn't it all madness anyway?

so whatever, i don't really think i cracked the poem or anything but it was fun and entertaining to think about.  maybe that's what's wrong w/ poetry too--there's too much pressure to take it oh so seriously.  it's easier to just play and have fun and let the meaning find you as opposed to the other way around. 

I remember my junior and senior year of hs, we had to paraphrase poetry, and i used to argue with my teacher, about how people interupt poetry differently and there should be no right and wrong answer, and no matter what I should be right. Anyways, I never won that arguement. But to answer you question, no i don't "get" poetry but I wish I did, I think people who do sound very smart.

I dont believe there are any "right or wrong" interpretations of a poem. It is more relative to the person reading it and what you take away from it. I learned in a poetry class to ask yourself some general questions after reading a poem, who is speaking in this writing, who are they speaking to, how does it make you feel to read this , how does it speak to you? Dont get bogged down with the literal meanings - how they make sense, how they dont- there is a message there- but everyone may take something different away from it.  

William Carlos Williams! Halleybird, that's one of my favorite poems.

I have always loved poetry and probably have easily 50 poetry books. Some I haven't read in quite a while but when I look at them I remember how much I enjoy what's between the covers and I can't part with them. Okay - now my own nerdiness comes out!

I agree with Lilyann. While I always enjoyed literature classes in school, and learning about interpretations I might have never considered, I believe that poetry is different things to different people. No one can say exactly what will (or won't) resonate with each different individual.

-- Edited by atlgirl at 18:16, 2005-11-30