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