Poetry 2

 So poetry right? It’s fun and interesting and everything until you have to sit down and analyze a poem about the Titanic which is apparently structured like the Titanic. Cheers to all the poets out there, cause that’s exactly what I needed in my life, more things to analyze.

 (‘Life’ ‘analyze’ do those two rhyme? Sounds like it. Eh I digress)

In my last post I tried to be all intellectual and find out why poetry is still so relevant in our society, and I came up with this theory that poetry works well because it’s the grey area between novels and songs, and so you get the best of both worlds. But still I mean it’s not necessary for a poet to ensnare and confuse me with twisted riddles when all they want to say is ‘pay attention to what you’re doing, people can trick you’. Like yeah Mr. Olive Senior I know that, but because of you I now have to write an essay on that. Like proper using words and coherent sentences. 

(I wonder though, what would happen if I answered a poetry prompt in the form of a poem?)

But now before any points are deducted because I haven’t given any insightful commentary on poetry let me talk about what I did learn about poetry this break.

Going back to the Titanic poetry, while I still haven’t come completely round to poetry it did serve as a great medium for me to see how poetry can be manipulated into showing bigger ideas. With books it’s very hard to get readers into a flow because you can’t structure your book to be half sentence first line, second half a different line. And to be frank very rarely do people care about lyrics, and when they do they Google it, and Google isn’t going to concrete structure it. So now not only are you using words to show imagery and convey messages, but you are also using the way you write it, the format and the shape of the poem to convey a message. And if that wasn’t enough poetry can also be a cover.

The beauty of poetry is that it hides as much as it reveals. Because poets have such a wide array of tools to convey their meaning, they can share a message but also hide aspects of it. Writing is very cathartic (I remember stuff we learnt) and we don’t always want to show what we mean, so poets have this opportunity to write about stuff that delivers a message but at the same time plays coy. 

But yeah, honestly those are the only real reasons I could think about for why people are still so into poetry. Like if you wanna convey something just say it, why do you want to warn me about something, but do so in a convoluted, roundabout way. Just say it.