Left-brained

Some people just don’t get poetry. (I would be one of them.) I looked up the phrase “I don’t get poetry” on Google today, and found this gem of a message board posting:
I Just Don’t Get Poetry.

The original question:

Will someone please tell me what the deal is with poetry? I just don’t get it. It always seems like poets just take a long sentence, write the words on different lines and call it poetry. And the more vague the sentences are , the “better” the poem. At least rhyming poets make an effort.

Among the answers:

Get poetry? What’s to get? I just like the way the words sound in my head. (If, in fact, the words do sound like poetry.)

……………………………………………………………..

For me (very important, that), the way words sound in my head and the “story” (I use that term loosely) they ostensibly tell are not inherently related. For me, a story, or scene, or concept, should be accessible to my imagination without the means of communication (the medium) buzzing around to distract me. The more invisible the medium, the better (for me). To my way of thinking, poetry is for poets.

Inevitably (it’s a sci-fi messageboard), Klingon poetry surfaced:

jIHvaD SoH Du’angmo’ ‘u’ jIQuch
‘ach not qaghajbe’mo’
vaj jItlhuch

jIQongtaHvIS maghom ‘e’ vInaj
chIch macholchuqchoHchu’
Hot DIrmaj

DeSDu’wIj poSDaq bIDejDI’ SoH
‘IwwIj DameQchoHmoH.
chonongmoH

Though it really can’t compare with the art of the “SciKu” as illustrated therein:

Blast the evil planet
Death to the alien race
Watch them die
……………………………
It’s in the water
just below the surface there
the alien sleeps.
…………………………………..
Whoa! Sci-Fi Poetry!
Bloggers too profound for me…
Head hurts, need more babes…

Some other responders spoke of poetry as the art of using words in an impressionistic way, comparing poetry’s relationship to prose with a painting’s relationship to a photograph. Another talked about the role of poetry to convey emotion. Several said that people were just reading the wrong poets and directed readers to better poets.

All these I’ve heard before, and can appreciate as descriptions of what poetry is, and yet, it (mostly) fails to move me. Much as I’ve never really enjoyed abstract art or shellfish, I find I can’t enjoy (most) poetry. Especially poetry that is fairly recent.

I think my response is very much like the person, above, who said that they don’t like it when the medium (the words) gets in the way of the meaning (the story, or idea that they convey). I find that the poetry that I do like, and by extension the music that I like, is generally not because of its words, but rather because of its rhythm, its meter, and so on.

I like poems with a heavy, almost singsongy tone to them — Poe’s “The Raven” for example — and those where you explore how nonsense can sound sensible, like “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. But in those poems, the words are appreciated almost completely for themselves, not necessarily as an attempt to express some sort of emotional meaning.

Maybe I’m irreparably left-brained, but for me, reading (good) prose is so natural as to seem like breathing. I can scan through pages of text in very little time. I apparently taught myself to speed-read in my formative years; at one point I realized that when I read, my eyes don’t actually scan back and forth across a line of text. Rather, they track straight down the page, and I catch the bulk of the meaning that way (I assume that my brain sort of fills in the missing words with “best guess” type processing).

Thus, when I encounter words that slow me down, such as you do with poetry, where words are used in unconventional ways, and you’re supposed to savor each line slowly in order to extract all possible meaning from it, I am just annoyed. (I also get annoyed at badly-written texts, written in militaryese or businessese or, worst, engineeringese, that slow me down because they make no SENSE until you look up at least a third of the catchphrases and “code words” that they use.)

That’s interesting, because musically, I tend to either like the words or the music, and I’ve never really liked any song because of its words. Usually I like them in spite of the words, if I even bothered to figure out what the words were. So I guess I’m a purist, then? Let my words be words and let my prose convey meaning only, and don’t bother me with collections of words that, if you linger over them long enough, might convey “deeper” meanings.

Besides, I’m good at coming up with fantastical and obscure “interpretations” of anything abstract — I have a formidable imagination. Thus I have a hard time buying into anyone’s far-fetched explanation of the real meaning of a very abstruse poem. Because really, they could have made it up on the spot. For that matter, you could make up a poem on the spot and start assigning it obscure meanings, if you have any sort of verbal ability at all…

Maybe if they were word games, I could appreciate that. (Ah, but there comes the left-brainer approach again.) I guess I really just take exception to something that isn’t rational by nature, since for me words are there to convey an idea (including stories) using the most efficient method possible. I’m not a person who lingers over the words, though I’ve been known to read and reread books or sections of books for a story that I want to relive.

Though I do find magnetic poetry intoxicating… I have a reaction much like this person, who warns us: “There are certain things that are quite obviously bad ideas, things that will obviously quickly cascade out of control. … For example, introducing a linguist to magnetic poetry.” He comments that a pile of magnetic words really does need alphabetizing — which has always been my first approach to that pastime (No! Second! First I divide them into the parts of speech. Nouns here, verbs here, adjectives here, adverbs there, conjunctions and suffixes somewhere else…) Hmmm. I think I’m going to break out my three separate packages of magnetic poetry to while away the evening…