11-25-2012, 10:04 AM
The thing with the Internet is that it's too impersonal. But when people are my family or my friends, and they are right there, and I want to share something with them, and they refuse to even look at it, or take it seriously, I feel I'm wasting my time talking to them about it, but the emotions, if not the content, of the poems come from them. So it's troubling.
"As a consequence of two or three generations of being told precisely what to think, how to act, who to vote for and so forth etc ad infinitum..."
This is true. But when you don't have anyone that agrees with you that you can intimately discuss these things with, that you can spend time with. And when you try to question these things with people that you know and have feelings for, they attack you and tell you you're stupid, and cut off all contact with you, and go vote for George Bush or start snorting prescription drugs every day and night, you start to crack up inside from frustration and loss.
Poetry is way of showing things. Whether the "I" is you or another "I" you're using. As for me, I don't much care if people love or hate my poems. What I care about is how people use poetry to react to the world. Which seems to be somewhat what you're saying about being conditioned by popular opinion and practice. How many usually react to poetry or anything that makes them think is, "Go away. That's boring and too much trouble to deal with." And though I keep trying to talk about the importance of poetry, what it can do, and how many ways poetry can be expressed, I keep feeling that people are arguing against me for trying to enforce the importance of MY poetry.
And I mean here, lately. That many of the responses here are accusing me of talking only about MY poetry, when I'm talking about all poetry.
"As a consequence of two or three generations of being told precisely what to think, how to act, who to vote for and so forth etc ad infinitum..."
This is true. But when you don't have anyone that agrees with you that you can intimately discuss these things with, that you can spend time with. And when you try to question these things with people that you know and have feelings for, they attack you and tell you you're stupid, and cut off all contact with you, and go vote for George Bush or start snorting prescription drugs every day and night, you start to crack up inside from frustration and loss.
Poetry is way of showing things. Whether the "I" is you or another "I" you're using. As for me, I don't much care if people love or hate my poems. What I care about is how people use poetry to react to the world. Which seems to be somewhat what you're saying about being conditioned by popular opinion and practice. How many usually react to poetry or anything that makes them think is, "Go away. That's boring and too much trouble to deal with." And though I keep trying to talk about the importance of poetry, what it can do, and how many ways poetry can be expressed, I keep feeling that people are arguing against me for trying to enforce the importance of MY poetry.
And I mean here, lately. That many of the responses here are accusing me of talking only about MY poetry, when I'm talking about all poetry.