Book Meme - Day 17

What is your relationship with poetry like?

Every now and then I come across an amazing poem. One that seems to speak directly to my soul or illuminates things I hadn't considered or is just neat. And then I think that I should really read more poetry than I do. But it never quite pans out.

I think the issue is that those gems are rare. And you have to wade through a whole lot of poems to get to the few that speak to you directly. And even though poems are short, that can get boring pretty quickly.

I've signed up for a poem-a-day email. Every morning while I'm eating breakfast, a poem arrives in my email box. It should be easy to read a single poem once a day during a time when I'm often actively searching for short things to read. The reality is that I read maybe one of these a week. Maybe less. Often they just don't capture my attention.

Recently I bought a slim volume of poetry. I liked a couple of them. But I found most of them trite. And I read the entire thing in less than an hour. I had to bring a second book that day because the one volume of poetry couldn't sustain both my morning and evening commute.

Maybe part of the problem is that I can't quite slow down enough to appreciate poetry. At least not on demand. Which is a little odd, because I'm generally pretty good at slowing down in other areas of my life. But there's so much to read that I just don't have the patience for poetry unless it's exception. And that's such a subjective measure that it's hard to seek out poetry that I'll like.

I guess I'm basically a passive appreciator of poetry. Every now and then I come across a poem that I really like while I'm engaging in some other activity (often surfing the web). I love when this happens, and I'm doing what I can to increase these random encounters. But at this point I think I have to accept that I'm never going to dig deep into poetry and learn to appreciate it as a form they way I did with comic books and am slowly learning to do with plays.

Ah well, there's plenty of other art to enjoy and plenty of other people to enjoy poetry.