Why people hate poetry

I'm eyeballs-deep in this book right now, in an effort to learn why people hate poetry so much.

In a way, I get it. Poetry is really alienating. It's mysterious. It's lost its allure since the rhyming days helped us remember our cultural artifacts, the stories that made us who we are.

I suppose I'm reading this book because I'm not intrinsically a poet. I just don't know what other medium makes sense.

Ben Lerner makes excellent points in describing the "ick" factor that accompanies so many poems ... that kind of mucky feeling you get when you read something that's considered "bad."

The elegance of poetry is that it describes the world in metaphor, and then it adds another metaphor on top of that.

Those layers and layers of meaning give us the chills and bring us back for more. When you're simply describing the world in a flat fashion, though, you're not a poet, in my estimation. You're just capturing what really happened. You're more of a ... reporter? Nonfiction writer?

At any rate, I would recommend that you check out Lerner's book. It's concise, charming, and engaging, and I'm personally intending to read it over immediately after I finish this first run. In addition to that, I'm working at a pretty inexpensive e-course called "Getting to Good," hosted through the University of Wisconsin. Just a few exercises in, and I've found that the principles have already elevated my poetry.