I took a Teaching & Tutoring Writing course in college, and one day our professor brought in a bunch of sample writing projects students had turned in. All the names had been blacked out, but the students had given permission for the use of their work. I picked one up and the cover was simply the hand-written word "Poetry" in a wobbly circle and a line through it. Intrigued, I read the article detailing "Why I Hate Poetry."
Since any good college student knows an academic paper must include legitimate references. So this charming student decided, most likely due to the lack of academic literature detailing hate for an entire art form, to quote a poem. It was TS Elliot's "The Wasteland" which, I admit, I don't care for either.
What really stood out to me was the student's second quote -- lyrics from a U2 song. He or she praised the lyrics, rhetorically asking why poetry couldn't be more straightforward like that. I literally laughed out loud.
If you like music with lyrics, you like poetry. When you hate a particular song or a band or even a genre of music, you don't say "I hate music."
If you give store-bought greeting cards, reading each to find one that accurately depicts the sentiment you feel towards a person, you like poetry. The cards you dismiss don't make you say "I hate greeting cards."
If you're fond of quotes that capture a complex idea or universal truth in but a few words, you like poetry. Disagreeing or simply not appreciating a specific quote, the person who is quoted, or even the person who is quoting doesn't make you say "I hate quotes."
The logic behind the essay title "Why I Hate Poetry," applied to anything else, seems ridiculous. "Why I Hate Food" might detail "I hate vegetables, but I like meat. Why can't vegetables be more like meat?"
TL;DR?
Fuck all haters.
No comments:
Post a Comment