Poetry

Poetry was once the thing you know. Poets were venerated like rock stars. I was suprised to see in a book that some of these poems we have to study in school are actually considered "bad" poems, I thought that was a judgement I had made unique to myself. I think that we have a real need for poetry, we are just finding it somewhere else. We find it in song lyrics.

Everyone knows the words to certain songs, everyone discusses what these songs might mean. The song "Bad Company" is about a man "born with a sixgun in my hand" It conjurs up the old West and a certain world weariness and a feeling that if I am bad then that is what I will be, you can call me bad company. The song "Cruel to be Kind" was discussed and the many ways you have to be cruel to be kind. "Losing My Religion" was a powerful song with lyrics that we decided was about losing one's mind maybe, then again, maybe not. The meaning of poetry is not always clear, but the mood of a poem can be the clearest thing of all. It summons up feelings and longings and things unseen and remakes everything into beautiful. We think of poetry as being flowery and feminine, we think of poetry as the stuff we had to study in school that seemed to belong to a foreign land to people that spoke a different language and had nothing to do with us. In music poetry begins again. I am listening.