Why you don’t get poetry

A dear friend of mine once said and I quote, “I hate literary niggas.”

Of course he did not mean that he hated anyone in the true sense of hate. This was an expression of his resentment towards anyone who had a an incline for drama or the poetic. Oddly enough, my friend also happens to be incredibly enraptured by the rendition of Hell Fire and Heaven’s Light performed in the Cathedral of Notre Dame; so this might be a call for sober reflection on his part (sorry Victor.)

But Victor’s resentment echoes what many of us feel the moment a poem shows up on our feed. When we see lines of poetry, we are suddenly transported to that English class that we tried our hardest to be great at, but literature kept coming in the way. Or that time we tried to write a narrative essay and our scores did not come out as we expected. Or that cool but cryptic guy who would only be friends with people who “got” his poems; most of which you never did.

What you feel when a poem shows up on your social media feed might not be a disinclination to poetry, but a compressed edition of all those negative feelings rising up to the surface of your mind. It is the nature of the human mind to use indifference to preserve itself from feeling to many things at once.

Understanding poetry is both a walk in the park and a complex thing: after all, there are people who spend considerable years of their lives becoming masters of literature and such. But we do not need to be these people.

We, as ordinary people, from every walk of life can understand poetry. That is because poetry is not intended to make us think. Poetry is intended to make us feel. While the feelings evoked in poetry can cause deep contemplation, it is almost always not a direct influence. The reason you do not get poetry is because you are treating it as one would a riddle or a story or an essay.

But cast your mind back to that moment when you went on a vacation with a couple of your friends. The sun was sitting pretty and casting a golden glow on everyone and recognizing the great potential for a great photo, a friend of yours tries to capture the moment, though most of you were unaware. There was the lone female among you stuck in a hearty, bellyaching laughter, another friend was dancing in the middle to a tune only he could hear and yet another friend stared into the horizon, drink in hand, just capturing the moment and basking in it.

Imagine you all had a copy of this photo; which your friend probably took on a polaroid; and years later, the pretty lady you want to marry or the handsome man you are head over heels for asks you to define the meaning of the photo. Would you not think he was insane?

But this is what many of us do when we read a poem.

The great poet and Poetry Laurette of the United States Billy Collins puts it this way in his poem Introduction to Poetry

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.

We try to squeeze meaning from the literature when there really isn’t much meaning to it. A poem is meant to capture and confer an experience on you. Basically, the poet is trying to make you feel what they felt when they captured the poem. Therefore, trying hard to find the meaning could be counterintuitive. Instead, the bulk of your energy should be focused on the experience of reading the poem.

How does this line make you feel? What does this scenery make you remember? Where have the closing words of this poem landed you?

Poems use literary devices like Metaphor, Similes and Puns to evoke emotions and poets usually spend most of their time trying to figure out the simplest expression that best evokes the experience. But poets can also be a little indulgent and want to play with the language. Still, it is not to the end that the poem is cryptic, but to the end that they deliver a piece of literature so potent and timeless that many would talk about it for ages to come. It is between these two desires that we find ourselves whenever a piece of poetry traps us in confusion.

This is where Freeform Poetry comes in. In Freeform poetry, writers are not held back by the rules and walls of classic literalism and all they just want to do is create resonance with their audience. If you find yourself labouring over Shakespeare or any other classic poem, now might be the time to train yourself in understanding poetry by reading something a dear poet friend of yours wrote. Start with writers with whom you can relate and work your way from there.

I leave you with this: Poetry is beautiful and can be understood.

Hey I have recently compiled a small collection of freeform writing myself. I wrote about love, God, providence and despair. If you are interested in exploring any of these in a way that evokes an emotion, then you are in luck, I am sharing it for free on Selar.

Only do one thing for me. Email me about your experience at olayinkaadeoye39@gmail.com and do not forget to share which parts stood out the most to you on social media.