Poetry

There are several different perspectives people have when they think of poetry.

Poetry can connect many emotions together. Poetry can just be a bunch of rhyming words left for individual interpretation. Poetry can bring together many thoughts and ideas and convey them in a very concise method.

When I think of poetry, I think of it the way Sir Isaac Newton does - "a kind of ingenious nonsense." The combination of literary devices and sound devices in such a short writing piece is amazing. The rhythm, the extended metaphors, and the themes (to name a few examples) are impressive and appear to take much thought and deliberation to come up with. However, I do agree that it is nonsense. The brevity of poems is what makes them amazing, but I do not think they can properly convey a theme. There are so many ways that poems can be interpreted that it makes the ingenuity behind them seem unimpressive (at least to me). I think the audience just over thinks many of the poems and that is what makes them ingenious. Sometimes, I feel like the poet is just writing about nature or a bird or a car. But no. Someone has to come along and interpret that bird as something abstract like selfishness and then this results in a open discussion on the possible interpretations of the poem. This just makes the writer seem like a genius for coming up with such a topic.

I hope my opinion about poetry can be changed this year. My experiences thus far (in middle school and ninth grade) were really bad and this is a major reason why I don't enjoy poetry as much as others do.