Too stupid to read poetry

>too stupid to read poetry

Eliot was a hack...right?
Seriously, why cant I understand poetry? I am not particularly intelligent, but I'm confident that I am at least average.

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Where the fuck did you get that picture of me

your mum

oh nevermind that is johnny depp not me

Its on your Myspace

What are you reading? The Wasteland? because that is kind of advanced. Try the Quartets or try older poems with rhymes 'n shit.

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

That was a stupid choice of excerpt

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

Chances are you're going in expecting to understand it the same way as you would prose. Even the most conventional poetry exploits ambiguity hugely. It's not meant to be understood the first time reading through, and a decent amount of it isn't meant to be understood at all.

And if you're talking about someone like Eliot, a hugely fragmented, allusive modernist, you'd better be taking notes and reading annotations or I'll come over there and fuck you up dawg

O living creature, gracious and benign; that goest through the black air, visiting us who staine the earth with blood:
if the King of the Universe were our friend, we would pray him for thy peace ; seeing that thou hast pity of our perverse misfortune.

Ok, this is how I got into it: go to a bookshop, pick one poetry book, read a poem. If you like it buy the book, if you don't, pick another one until you find something you like, then buy the one you like. I would suggest you to pick from classics authors, and to avoid (at least for now) contemporary "unknown" authors. Even though, if you find something you like from a less known author, read that too. It is a bit like pornography: as soon as you find something you like, you will crave for more without even noticing. And then you will end up with your eyes on very fucked up stuff (e.g. Ezra Pound) and have a great time nonetheless.

You shouldn't feel bad about not understanding poetry. It's not a matter of intelligence. I'm a published poet and author, and I'm married to an engineer who doesn't understand poetry and has no interest in it. Doesn't bother me in the least, because poetry is both personal and subjective, so a poem that means a great deal to one person may be seen as trivial or worthless to the next. Even the poets that we consider the "masters" are as equally disliked as they are loved. Instead of trying to plow your way through a single poet, try reading an anthology of poetry, from any time period that interests you, which will give you a wider scope through which to look.

The eyes are not here, there are no eyes here, in this hollow valley, this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

I'm talking about this exact issue in this thread A year ago, I was in your exact position. I had no feeling for poetry at all. But now, I'm able to think in an entirely different way that I couldn't before, which I believe is necessary to actually appreciate poetry and more advanced prose, and which causes particular forms of thought to arise in my mind when I read a poem which didn't before. I'm completely convinced that some people simply won't be able to understand poetry until they activate this mode of thought, so you should feel no shame.

Is there anything you can say that would help one to go from state A to state B faster? to active this mode of thought?

Eliot is hard and unconventional. Start with the simplest shit imaginable: Sylvia Plath, Phil Larkin, etc. There's no shame in that.

>Even the most conventional poetry exploits ambiguity hugely.

Using ambiguity is not the same as being obscure. Frost uses a lot of ambiguity, but one does not feel lost after the first read; there is a clear difference between being ambiguous and being hard to understand.

>It's not meant to be understood the first time reading through,

Most poetry isn't hard at all to understand on the first read. Obscurity in English poetry has increased tenfold in the last two centuries. The reason is not far to seek. Since Eliot obscurity has not been counted against poets; before Eliot it was. Browning's Sordello was panned (notably by Tennyson) for being hard to read. But nobody takes seriously any complaint that Pound's Cantos are hard to read. "Why not buy Such-and-Such's Companion to the Cantos? If you don't understand them that's on you, you haven't tried hard enough." With this servile attitude I have no sympathy.

>and a decent amount of it isn't meant to be understood at all.

If anything does match that description, it isn't worth anyone's time. But it depends what you mean by "understood". In one sense, many have understood The Waste Land—its methods, its images, its general concerns. In another sense, nobody has understood the precise point of every image, except maybe Eliot himself. About a good poem we may say that a man will quite soon apprehend it, and never entirely comprehend it. If we imagine a man pointing at some distant object: we will quickly know where he is pointing, but scarcely what we are looking at.

If a poem is not meant to be understood "at all", it's rubbish. If it's not meant to be finally understood, it's only like most other poems.

>And if you're talking about someone like Eliot, a hugely fragmented, allusive modernist, you'd better be taking notes and reading annotations or I'll come over there and fuck you up dawg

You speak of Eliot as though he had only written The Waste Land

>Start with Plath and Larkin
when you look back, can you see no further than modernism?

But I agree that Larkin is an appropriate starting point. In addition to being easy to read, he was a remarkable fellow. Hated "modernism" and used it as a term of abuse. Resurrected the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Most importantly, he wrote great poetry. Yes, I say easy to read: I emphatically do not say "the simplest shit imaginable", which is not true, and moreover I deny the connection you suppose between clarity and simplicity. Larkin is clear; he is not simple.

Listen to lots of music very closely. Paying close attention to individual notes and what each instrument is playing. This I believe helped me to activate new modes of thinking.

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>but I'm confident that I am at least average.
average at the least! it's not much to be of course, but at least I'm like the rest of these morons, and no worse!

come, put aside this vanity, there is no need to be asking yourself "how does my intelligence compare?" or "am I at least average?". these questions bring you nowhere; leave them.

>when you look back, can you see no further than modernism?

Not sure what you mean.

>But I agree that Larkin is an appropriate starting point. In addition to being easy to read, he was a remarkable fellow. Hated "modernism" and used it as a term of abuse. Resurrected the poetry of Thomas Hardy. Most importantly, he wrote great poetry. Yes, I say easy to read: I emphatically do not say "the simplest shit imaginable", which is not true, and moreover I deny the connection you suppose between clarity and simplicity. Larkin is clear; he is not simple.

Yeah whatever you wanna call it. Point is there's no reason to jump into the deep-end. A lot of "pleb" poets are fine to read for beginners.

Comparing yourself to others all willy-nilly is where insecurity comes from.

Just concentrate on what you are doing.

It's actually a better success strategy in general than caring about what other people think or say.

>Yeah whatever you wanna call it.

I think you're construing me as someone who only reads difficult modernists. I'm not at all. But i'd argue that all poetry to some extent does what I'm talking about. Take Keat's La Belle Dame for example. Very simple peom; can be understood on a first read no problem. But if you read it again, you'll notice the line "And there she sigh'd and wept full sore". If you're an attentive reader, you will realize the implications of this line are that our previous reading of the poem, that the Belle Dame is indeed Sans Merci, does not hold. She is clearly a more complex character. Yet why Keats included this line, and what it actaully tells us about the lady's motive is beyond our grasp, and is so deliberately. This is my point about rereading. Well crafted poems tend to include enigmas and tensions, whether deliberate or accidental, and its through these that poetry truly breathes

Theres a reason so many people have compared poetry to a classical urn. The purpose of an urn in some sense is to hold something inside it, but a classical painted urn obviously shares this purpose only to an extent. The beautiful artwork means that the urn, though it might not have to be, may as well be empty, since the artwork etched onto it fulfils more than enoguh of a purpose. Likewise, poetry might hold information, but to a large extent this is besides the point, because if you're reading a poem for this kind of content, it's as if you are just noting the contents of beautifully wrought grecian urns without any attention to the art itself, simply because our expectation is that langauge should convey information, the same way urns convey substances inside them.

Because you are a computer with a 4 year old girl bashing on the keyboard.

How do you like that poem.

10/10 classic