{Journal Entry #1} Introduction to Poetry

It's finally here! The Poetry course! After years of not caring much for poetry and then being absolutely traumatized by its study because of a mean teacher, I have been looking forward to this course, done by a professor whose classes I love and with an amazing syllabus!

These journal entries are for documenting the class-by-class experience and thoughts on some of the poems read for that class, plus any interesting things that might pop-up!

This class was all about our feelings towards poetry (with an expected amount of hate towards this misunderstood -often quite literally- genre) and "concrete poetry", or, poetry whose meaning is transparent and there is nothing to "interpret". The idea that great

It is funny (for me) that the profesor chose "Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins to illustrate this point when I had JUST heard about it on Literary Disco's most recent episode, exactly because they were discussing how potential obscurity factored into people's reading of poems and their views on poetry in general. The poem paints a vivid picture of how the speaker (possibly a professor) gives "them" (his or her students) a poem and instead of enjoying it they just want to find out what it means. In all fairness, I have met teachers who are obsessed with the "real meaning" of poems and the "proper" way of analyzing them, which is why poetry gets a bad rep (which is not to say some poetry really is obscure and that some poets go the extra mile to be extra indecipherable, but this is an issue for a different entry). 

Back to the poem, this is my favorite stanza:

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

(My professor acted it out and it was as awesome and wholesome as you can imagine, haha.)

And these, with the torture imagery, are the stanzas that really encapsulate what poetry can feel like under the watchful authority of The Professor:

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Sadly, the first time I heard it I thought it said "beating it with a horse", which would have made it much more whimsical, in my opinion. Either way, great poem to get people into poetry: vivid images, easy to understand, and extremely relatable! Can you do any better?

Another favorite, which we (sadly) did not get to in class was Roald Dahl's "Little Red Riding Hood and the Wold". I had not read any of his Revolting Rhymes before, but having read some of his short stories and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , I knew how twisted his humor can be. And he did not disappoint! Definitely check it out, and I will check the full collection as soon as I can as well. 

As a lover of literature and language, I think there is something extremely comforting in understanding that poetry is not some strange thing out there but something that can relate to us since we are children and grows with us in the form of lyrics, and we can access it in written form as well, both with effort and without. Both readers and teachers just need to release the pressure on poetry as an unreachably high form, which is not to say it cannot be, just that it does not always need to be. 

Which is why I voted for Coleridge's definition of poetry as the best one:

"Prose = words in their best order; — poetry = the best words in the best order."