“On my reluctance to read poetry”,
I’m just now realising that it’s been like 100 years since I wrote an “On...” essay. Interesting. Anyway the reason why I write this is because I’m in 10th grade now and I’ve just reached the grade where my new English teacher is making me read poetry. We read some Dickinson last week and now we’re reading a little bit of Whitman. Before this I tried everything possible to not read poetry such as this with the reasons being multiple.
One is that I just don’t like verbose/Romantic poetry. Ex. I tried reading Tales of a Wayside Inn and got bored about a tenthway through so I just decided to DNF it (I actually think I tried twice and DNFed it both times). They tend to use rhyme in some way (Tales of a Wayside Inn is a great example of this; Dickinson and Whitman less so), and I hate rhyming poetry. The other thing about Romantic poetry is that it tends to treat everything as deserving of elevated/dramatic language, which I disagree with (I don’t think anything deserves that, really). But that doesn’t fully explain, on its own, why I don’t like reading poetry generally.
Earlier in the week we read “Much Madness is Divinest Sense” by Dickinson. Everybody else in class had a bunch of annotations on it but I barely had any because I didn’t understand what the hell it meant. So I asked someone and he told me he just Googled what it meant along with the vocabulary. That’s the type of writing I hate (writing which says a whole lot of nothing until you resort to SparkNotes to figure it out) and I strive to not be like that.
The second reason is that I think I just see poetry as a very personal thing to write and as such I don’t like to read it when written by other people. Prose isn’t exactly the same because prose is mostly unremarkable/unadorned (the “default” of most Western writing). Poetry is a specific choice made by the author to relay a specific message to the reader which wouldn’t be possible (or would be meaningfully more difficult to write/understand) to relay in prose. It also conveys their specific personality.
The most “principled” reason is because I think meaning is a very poewrful thing and everybody needs to create it themselves. I don’t think we can adequately find meaning in the modern day of Trump and Citizens United and Christian fundamentalism in Whitman, and that’s no fault to him, because he never could have predicted that. But it does mean we have to put our big-boy boxers on and work to create something for ourselves instead of looking back too much. I would be content with nobody reading my work after my death, for example (though they could if they really wanted to and I wouldn’t object), because I write for now.
The other reason is because I generally don’t like having to read texts just because someone else thinks I should or because they’re “classics”. This is related to why a lot of people can do things as a hobby but suck at those same things when being graded for a class, and is also why I’ve never liked any book I’ve read in school save for The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and Animal Farm by George Orwell. Whitman is one of those authors that an English teacher would say “every poet responds to in adoration or rejection” (like how philosophers talk about Kant). I don’t want to do that. I just want to write to serve the purpose I want to serve. Frank Ocean doesn’t make music in response to Otis Redding and his song “Try a Little Tenderness”. He just makes music that serves the purpose he wants to convey. I want to do the same thing because I don’t want to focus on dead people. Their time has passed, much since passed... ♦