Thread: Poetry?

Is it me? is it the poet? or the subject matter?

My father would read me this poem by Ezra Pound the Ballad of the Goodly Fere and he would always get a little choked up. this is my standard for good poetry.
I have lately been paying close attention to the inaugural poem for Obama by elizabeth Alexander Praise for tha Day I have not been able to make heads or tails out of it! It makes my head hurt! Is it really that bad or has poetry changed so much since Ezras time that I just dont get it?

What is it you don't understand about the poem?

Originally Posted by Blade Wielder

What is it you don't understand about the poem?

When I read Ezra I compare him to Lou aka scarface telling a humorous story, when I read Elizabeth it is compared to me telling a humorous story, in other words, anyone can do what she did! Not everyone can be a Lou or an Ezra or, for that matter, a pablo or a Vincent! Yet she was honored by being accepted to write the inaugural poem. Surely we have better talent than this.

Originally Posted by JMS

When I read Ezra I compare him to Lou aka scarface telling a humorous story, when I read Elizabeth it is compared to me telling a humorous story, in other words, anyone can do what she did! Not everyone can be a Lou or an Ezra or, for that matter, a pablo or a Vincent! Yet she was honored by being accepted to write the inaugural poem. Surely we have better talent than this.

That's just the way it goes, I guess. Greater familiarity usually begets greater respect.

Vincent died a penniless vagrant and a commercial failure; Pablo a cultural cliche, despised by many of his contemporaries. Ever since then, even the most minor of their works have sold for fortunes.

If you bought a "2008" bottle of (lousy) wine a month or two ago, you might have stowed it away in your basement as casually as you did the Jiff peanut butter. But leave there a couple of decades and when someone dusts it off they'll say, "Oooh, a 2008!" I guarantee it. I think my point is that perspective is a lot easier to gauge when you've taken a few steps back -- or forward, in this case.

Poetry isn't so much about rhyme, meter and high language as it is personal experience. A writer's Polaroid snapshot. That's kind of a good comparison, actually: those Polaroid shots. In the moments after those cameras spit out the picture, you don't look at it with any reverence. I know I've always thought of them as novelties. But when you find them in a drawer years later, they'll speak to you. To a lot of kids, Ezra Pound was just a stupid-sounding name in a school book. Because of the personal element between you, your father and him, though, you'll never think of him in the same light as those kids.

The same is true with this Obama poem. It's a personal account of what's happened and all that had to happen before it could happen. The language is plain English because I don't think it's meant to be studied or marvelled at, but just remembered, by everyone who was there - here - to see it happen. And for the people a hundred years from now who want to know what we - she - felt at the time.

Having now read both poems, I'm at a loss to understand how the Ezra Pound poem is so much more understandable. Maybe you just heard it so many times that its meaning became ingrained, whilst the inaugural poem is new to you and not as familiar. I daresay that if you read the inaugural poem multiple times, its meaning is quite evident...

It's not that the inaugural poem was hard to understand, it's that it was bad. If there was some deeper meaning than what I gathered than maybe, but as is it's not a very insightful or emotion provoking poem.

Maybe if you moved all that hair away from your eyes you'd be able to read/understand the poem better...

Originally Posted by billyjeff2

Maybe if you moved all that hair away from your eyes you'd be able to read/understand the poem better...

I'm bald and I don't get it either

Originally Posted by billyjeff2

Maybe if you moved all that hair away from your eyes you'd be able to read/understand the poem better...

Nope still got nothing

Originally Posted by billyjeff2

Do you find the following to be any more understandable compared to the Elizabeth Alexander poem?:

"The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become."

Not more understandable but certainly more thought provoking, descriptive and emotional.

But did you know you can sing Amazing Grace to the tune of In The House of the Rising Sun?
YouTube - amazing grace