L36: Reason

I hate poetry because of the rules, and I probably hate it for that reason because I'm jealous of those who can write it when I can't.  I do not, however, hate dance when that is still very much the case.  I also don't hate singing or painting or drawing or film or any other art form in which I can engage, even if poorly.

But poetry, I hate, even at its most beautiful, I wish it could be sprung from the confines of meter and the shackles of rhyme and just be beautiful on its own.  And maybe it can, and maybe it can't, and I'm doing all I can to actively rip beauty from the prison it inhabited so long ago.  I feel justified in doing this, because artistically, poetry is somehow older than prose.

If you study dance, which I've not, you'll encounter post-modern dance, wherein anything is a dance if the dancer decides this to be the case.  And I agree (and not just because I have an affinity for the post-modern).  That's probably my biggest issue with poetry.  Prose exists, and thus the least poetic poems are cast off as not-poems, or, as it's called so derisively "prose."

Perhaps more than I hate poetry, I lament it and my inability to create it.  I believe in the ultimate pliability of words, the fact that anyone can do anything they want with a language and the passion, the fury, the beauty, will seep out if it is poured in with enough care.  And sometimes that care takes the form of a poetic arrangement, and I don't have the skill to do that, so, perhaps, I lament that it works.  Like post-modern dance though, the tenant still remains that artistic creation is more the product of an expressing heart than the end product itself.  Sometimes that heart soars, it leaps, it flies, it screams, it cries, it aches, it dies, it beats and pulses with life, sorrow, death, and rage, and love.  Perhaps mostly love.  And hope.  I hate that that heart can effectively be boxed into iambs.  But it can.

-Zack

"these days, mercy cuts so deep"
-Jars of Clay