Saturday 29 November 2014

Confessions re Modern Poetry




















In some quarters I could be shot for writing this but maybe it's about time I started living dangerously considering I'm never going to die young of the usual artistic mores...

Confessions of a Reader Who Doesn’t ‘Get’ Modern Poetry

Everyone except me seems to be in the know
About why poems often interrupt themselves mid-flow
Or end a sentence in mid-air
Leaving me to divine some hidden meaning there
They focus in such detail on achieving the abstract
Won’t be pinned down by anything so mundane as a fact
An opinion, a meaning or some thing to get a grip on
It’s like having a mountain to climb without a clampon
Tantalizing and elusive they allude to realms beyond my ken
One day I’ll wake up and understand every word, but when?
Modern poets often claim they don’t know what it’s about themselves
So what chance do I, the reader, have? And do I have room on my shelves?
For all these tomes of complexity, the odd shimmering line here and there
That save them from consignment to Oxfam (and my innermost despair)
Seems to me modern poets delight in making readers like me feel idiotic
Readers who are otherwise quite intelligent, or at worst, quixotic
Of course I can choose the easy life, I can pretend to comprehend
Refuse to invite doubt and speculation as to the vim and vigour
Of my intellectual rigour.
Or share any suspicion that imbibing the clutter of another’s head
Hoarded thoughts seemingly randomly disgorged like a Jackson Pollock said
Am I a whistleblower on the emperor’s new clothes? Should I eat my words?
Should I start a picket for the return of rhythm and rhyme?
Or invent a new sub-genre with sub-titles for each line?
I suppose time will tell which way poetry goes
And which way next the wind blows

                                                                ©LS King 2014

3 comments:

Steve said...

Don't knock enjambment it's

Great.

Wisewebwoman said...

Twisted angst I call it

XO
WWW

Marginalia said...

It's a shame when poems don't rhyme

Is it thought of as some sort of crime?

Blank verse is ok

But at the end of the day

Rhyming couplets are really sublime!