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