Not All Poems Are Good, People.

So I'm feeling like a horrible student of literature. It's not that I don't enjoy literature, I do. Really, I love to read and I usually enjoy reading new books for class and discussing them. I don't feel like a horrible student because of the books I have to read this semester, I feel like a horrible student because of the poems I'm being forced to read.

I'm a creative writing student, and for some reason the university feels that for me to get a complete and well rounded education for creative writing I must be forced to take a years worth of poetry classes where they force me to write my own poetry. I am not a poet. I've never pretended I was poet. I don't write poetry, I write fiction. When I go for my MFA I have to choose either poetry or fiction and never shall the two meet. At least, not in one program. So, my learning how to write poetry has nothing to do with my future in an MFA program, it's just SIUC's form of torture before they allow me to graduate.

That being said, I do not like the poetry I am being forced to read and emulate in my class. It's not that I hate poetry as an art form, I happen to like several poets. Ogden Nash, Rumi , W.H. Auden, Edgar Allen Poe, John Donne, Lord Byron, Shakespeare, all sorts of poets. I like poetry; however, I do not like THIS poetry. If the capital letters don't stress this enough let me make it clear, I do not like this, what IS the present literary era? Post-postmodernism? Are we still in the postmodernism era? Anyway, I don't like this incredibly long and boring poetical crap that we are producing in the modern era.

I just had to read five "expanded object" poems by five different authors and frankly most, if not all, of them were long and boring. Let's face, maybe Frost was write about unrhymed poetry. (Frost, by the way, said that writing an unrhymed poem was like playing tennis without a net.) I don't know, there are several poets I like who don't rhyme, but they seem to show more talent than these poets.

Robert Pinsky's poem "Shirt" just seemed long and depressing. I could see the point he was trying to make about sweat shops, but then he goes beyond that and somehow we end up in Scotland and "Braveheart" talk and I just don't really see the connection. I know there are things called poetical "leaps" but this one leaped right past me and I believe it missed its mark.

Worse, however, was Eamon Grennan's "Cows". This was pretty much as thrilling as watching a bunch of cows chew their cud. No, sorry, not my idea of a great read.

Can any of these authors write a sestina? Do they have any poetical talent whatsoever, or can they just string words on a page? I'll admit, I CAN'T write a sestina, but then again I'm not pretending to be a poet. Shouldn't a poem take a little more talent than writing vague or overly descriptive sentences and arranging them in some artistic way? Shouldn't writing a poem be challenging? Right now it seems like any teenager with angst can write a poem. What IS poetry any more?

And for that matter, I really must ask one last time, what literary era are we? Have we even started one or are we still trying to copy the greats from postmodernism? Is that all we will ever do, copy? Where is the poetry for this age? Maybe we should, if we are going to mimic, mimic a later age. Maybe we should try to recapture the greatness of an era BEFORE modernism, instead of continually following in the footsteps of the postmodernists.

Anyway, that is my rant for today. Mostly because I was bitter for having to waste a part of my Saturday reading poems I would never have finished if I didn't have to.