Poetry

Remember in high school English classes when there was that one teacher that made you analyze various poems? I was never a big fan of poetry, and Shakespeare? While there is a beauty to the way the words look upon the page and how they sound, I'm still not picking up poetry for my reading materials. In college one of my professors gave a couple of different options for a particular project: give a lesson for a whole class period upon a designated book, create multimedia presentation influenced by a specific writer or write a poem inspired by a poet and write a brief paper on the connection. Being overwhelmed with numerous other projects, work, and all I thought, "hey a poem should be easy!" My professor, unbeknown to me, was a rather famous poet... yeah my poem didn't do well.

I had a few friends in high school who wrote copious poems, filling whole notebooks and homework margins. I, on the other hand, covered nearly every possible surface in sketches, doodles and smudges. People have said that poetry paints pictures with the words that similar to creating a 3D painting- it has depth, layers, and allows the reader to see more completely. Any poem I've tried to write has made people laugh- because my attempts at writing poetry are just silly.

So it caught me off guard when I sat down to write a couple of days ago and poetry came to the page instead of my standard prose. Knowing that my best friend isn't one to sugar coat anything, I had him read it, fully expecting a couple of chuckles and laughs. Instead he just sat there quietly, for a while.

"Well what do you think?"
"It's.... good."
silence
"did you read it?"
"yeah."
"What do you think of it?"
"It's good."
"Really? It makes sense?"
"Yes. You should refine it a little more, but yeah, I like it. It's good."
"Hmmmm. So it wasn't funny?"
"No, it wasn't funny. Was it supposed to be?"
"Not intentionally."

I guess I'm giving poetry another shot. Though funny poetry is good too!