Yikes! It's been weeks since I last posted, but it's not because I haven't been reading. On the contrary, I have been working my way through scads of poems by Robert Frost and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Why these two particular poets? Because I have a book of selected works by Frost and a one volume of a set of Tennyson's complete poems.

Everyone reads a bit of both of these poets in school. You might remember "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Crossing the Bar," and "The Lady of Shallot," which are standard Tennyson fare in high school. As for Frost, you've likely read "Birches," "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Out, Out-," "The Death of the Hired Man," "Mending Wall," and, of course, the ubiquitous "The Road Not Taken." And if you read my last post, you've read "Nothing Gold Can Stay." You read a lot of Frost in school because it's fairly easy and fairly evocative.

Now, I found as I got in bed each night this month that while both Frost and Tennyson have taken up residence on my night table, I reached for Frost more often. I attribute this phenomenon to a few things. First, his poems tend to be a bit shorter than Tennyson and I often don't get into bed until quite late. Second, they are in modern English and thus require less mental energy to read. Third, Frost's poetry evokes the natural world, which I love to think about, especially in the spring. Fourth, the typeface was simply larger, making it much easier to read as my eyes got sleepy.

At any rate, though I am not yet through either collection, I did make a couple discoveries - new poems from each I had never read and that spoke to me immediately, without even taking time to reflect or interpret them. These I will examine separately over the next two days (the last two days in National Poetry Month).

But for today, I'd like to talk about poetry in general and get some feedback from you. It seems to me that people either purposefully read poetry, purposefully seek it out, or they just don't. You are either a poetry lover or you are indifferent. Do you find this to be true? Now, granted, there is a lot of bad poetry out there and one has to be discerning, but I really like poetry. To boil down a thought or a story into comparatively few lines of verse (compared to say a novel or an essay) and to do it with carefully chosen words, meter, rhyme, and form takes a lot of talent and a lot of learned, practiced skill.

The reason there is a lot of bad poetry out there, I think, is because some people look at it as "easy" because it's short. Slap a few lines down on paper about my feelings, ignoring form, rhyme, meter, vocabulary, etc., and you've got a poem. Nonsense. True poetry that endures is careful, deliberate, and disciplined. Free verse has its place, but I very much doubt that some random person's three pages of rambling, semi-incoherent thoughts on philosophy scrawled in a journal should be read and valued alongside the precise and purposeful works of Shakespeare, Donne, Burns, Shelley, Eliot, or Dickinson. These people sometimes took years to finish a poem of just ten lines. That's commitment.

So I have to ask, do you like poetry? Do you hate it? Are you indifferent? Why? How was poetry taught to you in school? Do you write poetry? What do you strive for in your poetry? What do you think is the "point" of poetry?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.