Poetry Emotion

One of my dirty little secrets is that I don’t like poetry. As dirty little secrets go, this one barely breaks my top 30, but there it is.

What is it about poetry that makes it so dull? It's got verve. There's imagery and all sorts of metaphors. Metaphors can be fun! And don't forget feeling. Poetry has feeling coming out the wazoo. There’s lots of stuff about the yearning of the soul. Maybe it’s the complacency of middle age, but my soul doesn’t yearn so much now. My soul mostly snorts, rolls over and goes back to sleep. Not a lot of poems about that sort of thing.

Poems aren’t real strong on plot or action. (Yeah, yeah, eddas and sagas and Homer, oh my. You know what I mean.) There hasn’t been much plot in the last few novels I read and I got through those. So what’s the deal?

Let’s be clear on this, I have a minor in English Lit and to this day I can quote Yeats and Coleridge and break down a quatrain like nobody’s business. When I play Boggle, I’m usually the only one in the room who sees “iamb”.

I like Brussels sprouts, but I don’t like poetry.

It was about time to get over my antipathy, so I thought I’d do it the easy way. I picked up “The Essential Rumi”. I used to know a bunch of Rumi. He’s lovely. Sufism and I go waaay back. It seemed like a logical place to start.

I got the book. I started reading the book. It’s interesting. I was doing okay. Then the mail came. The new cooking theory book was in it. Guess which I’m reading now. I’ll give you a hint: there’s more about Brussels sprouts than there is about yearning.