This Is All Just My Personal Opinion of Course, But I Feel it Quite Strongly

[leia131]

I never heard the phrase "art for art's sake" until this year, but now I'm enamoured with it.

It explains how I feel about poetry. Poems aren't meant to be torn word from word and line from line; they're meant to be read (out loud preferably) and enjoyed and mulled over and felt.

That's why poems are exempt from basic ordinary rules of grammar and word usage and sentence structure. They're beyond that.

If you need to analyze every word of a poem to get its meaning, then you've missed the point entirely.

Poems aren't written for anyone or anything other than the poet, (even if you think they are, they really aren't) and they aren't written for any other purpose besides simply to be written; to put into physical form a feeling.

Poems are good simply because they are, or they're bad simply because they are. You like a poem because it hits something in you, and you dislike a poem because it misses the mark. Poetry is the simpliest complicated thing in the world.


No matter what anyone ever says, I will always believe these things.

Comments

[tea-and-snark.livejournal.com]

I definitely promote the "art for art's sake" idea, especially when people think that any piece of writing they produce has to be political or has to make a big dramatic statement.

I'm not going to try to change your mind on this - because I've had experience trying the same in the past! ;) - but I just want to point out that, at least in college, a lot of this picking apart of poetry is to help us learn how to write better.

I suppose that hits a nerve because Writing Sems is the "serious" part of my major - I love film, but as long as you teach me how to operate a camera and set me loose, I'd be happy. Writing is something that I feel I can always enrich with classroom discussion, and one of the things that I love about my IFP classes is that we CAN pick apart poems to see what makes them so good - intelligently and with the purpose in mind of training us to be good writers too. As a reader, it may seem that bad poems simply "miss the mark" but to the writer of that poem it's extremely important to understand all the ways in which it was bad so that she can make it better. Picking apart the poems of already established and acclaimed writers is one way of understanding the process more.

What I mean is, poetry should absolutely be able to be appreciated for itself without any complicated technical dissection. Plus, it shouldn't be picked apart because of an empty feeling of obligation to do so - but if the student is willing and the study of the poem has a thoughtful and constructive direction, I think it's completely valid to pick a poem apart. I know that doing so - intensively and on a level I hadn't experience in high school - for six months has already helped me understand how to write better.

[leia131.livejournal.com]

Oh I completely understand dissecting a poem for learning purposes and to write better, I just hate doing it because that's just what you do in a Lit class. Also I'm no good at it. I like reading poetry and liking it or not and then letting it go and moving on with my life. And this is why I am a bio major.

The only things we dissect are frogs, and there's only one meaning behind what makes them tick.

I just had to read this thing tonight where this kid was dissecting a poem word by word and I just wanted to hit him over the head with my lit book (which is almost 2000 pages long so that would hurt) and scream ENOUGH ALREADY! and so I wrote a rant.

And you of course make a valid point about examining poetry, but the whole "study of the poem has a thoughtful and constructive direction" doesn't exist in this particular class. Cause the class is a joke.

And you're also not talking about "what does the word airplane MEAN here" or "what did they MEAN by saying airplane instead of boat" you're talking about analyzing and learning and writing better and if we were doing that I wouldn't have a problem.

[tea-and-snark.livejournal.com]

Hm...I can see your frustration! Although we really do pick poems apart word-by-word - literally! It gets boring sometimes, but I still think we learn a lot from it because it increases our awareness of how every single word matters - even if our readers will not consciously acknowledge this.