it’s no secret
Inasmuch as poetry prioritizes experience over simply conveying information, I wish I was better at experiencing it. It’s challenging in a way that prose isn’t, and it’s frustrating because I consider myself reasonably perceptive, right-brained person who typically has little difficulty apprehending themes, symbolism, metaphor, etc, from the prose that I read.
I think a lot of my frustration stems from the fact that I don’t think my poetry is very good. I’m not a transcendently good writer, but prose comes naturally to me, and I feel very confident expressing myself this way. Poetry, on the other hand, I just don’t have a mental framework for how to go about creating it. Traditionally, it’s just been a stream-of-consciousness type of thing, completed either all in one sitting or (more rarely) cobbled together from remembered fragments jotted down at random times before they flitted away. Problem is, there’s no way to conjure that mood, and regardless of whether it comes upon me or I attempt to assume it on command, the resulting poetry just, well, sucks. It doesn’t work on any level, structurally or aesthetically.
I’d love to learn, though. Poetry feels like a dance I haven’t mastered, but I’m just out there on the hardwood flailing about, whether reading or writing it. But how do you teach something that’s so intuitively expressed? Someone can show explain a painting to me, or explain the basic mechanics of how it’s created, but without an innate connection with the medium, all I’d be doing would be to robotically ape the style, void of substance, of a more talented artist. But maybe that’s how every creator gets started. “Every artist is a cannibal / every poet is a thief,” Bono sang. One approach I haven’t tried is to simply immerse myself in poetry for an extended period of time, and trust that some of its modus operandi will rub off on me to the degree that I might find it easier to “let go” and express myself that way and be satisfied with the output. I do remember taking a modern poetry class in college (that I enjoyed very much; it was my first experience hearing poetry read well, and it made an impression), one that required extensive reading, and I recall my brain chemistry adjusted to conform to the medium. Maybe I can make that happen again.