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Notes -
What is the right way to consume poetry?
I would like to achieve a greater understanding of poetry and the canon of great poets; and I have many books of those in my house. But I'm not really clear on how people read poems, I guess. Like, with a novel, I sit down and read for as long as I feel like. Maybe a whole hour in a row or whatever. With poetry, the length is not on the same scale, and you're not typically following a plot or a narrative or anything. Poetry enjoyers, any insight you can provide would be appreciated.
I find poetry grossly overrated, it's been largely superseded through song.
I can count on the fingers of a single hand the poems I find compelling enough to strike a chord in me, often producing outright frission, such as Howl by Ginsberg, Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas, and for more left-field examples:
By a six year old child named Neil who has more talent in his undropped balls than Rupi Kaur has in her whole body.
Or less seriously:
By Zhang Xiachong, a bandit leader from 17th century China.
When Alex Turner puts I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clark to music with his dulcet tones, he blows dry words on paper out of the water.
Poetry is dead because it's largely obsolete, no two ways about it.
I don’t necessarily disagree, it’s just that the human response to musical stimulus means that songwriters can ‘cheat’ without writing anything particularly beautiful or profound. Look at Pixar movies, the better ones are psychologically designed to make the audience cry, feel triumphant joy, whatever, and it’s all through the most rote, by-the-numbers formulaic orchestral music where everyone in the production chain knows exactly what emotional manipulation they’re going for. The first five minutes of Up might make many people cry, but neither the writing nor the composing is particularly impressive, it’s just pressing a button and expecting the natural human reaction. This isn’t as impressive to me as words - words alone - that can bring you to tears. Not that those can’t be formulaic, but it’s harder and requires more variety.
Even many Rupi Kaur poems can be made emotionally salient through music, I’m sure.
It depends on what you consider cheating.
Pixar (or much of animation in general) has characters that have idealized/neotenized versions of human faces that are more appealing to look at and also easier to read.
Look at weebs preferring anime girl waifus over cardboard cutouts of Real Women™.
I reject the most degenerate case, something along the lines of outright wireheading, but it is trivially possible to reframe your objection of:
To-
Would I find that technically impressive? Absolutely. I would also refuse to touch it with a twenty foot pole.
Vocalized music vs poetry has far more layers of abstraction on top, versus pushing buttons in human neurology, so I personally don't see this as a concern.
Poetry is an artifact of a time when songs-on-demand were either not possible or prohibitively expensive, but the two fill the same niche, with vocals enhancing music. I would compare it to black-and-white photography or cinematography versus color. Some (who I would call enormously pretentious) prefer the former because of technical difficulty alone, I consider that largely irrelevant right up to the point where we're talking directed brain stimulation, but largely because of what I consider downstream negative consequences. The slow but steady decline into irrelevance of poems will never cause the same.
Maybe if they were displayed over a funeral dirge of her being cremated alive as far as I'm concerned, but sadly nobody made me the Czar of Taste.
Doctors Sweet, Mark, and Ervin quietly shed a single tear in each of their graves, disappointed you'd stab them in the back like this, after putting up such a sterling defense of them.
Professional solidarity only goes so far, and I've already decried the onerous obligation of rolling The World's Worst Doctor (wheelchair bound with motor neurone disease) up a spiral staircase.
By all means, if someone wants to wirehead themselves or shoot up heroin, be my guest. Just don't ask me to join in, like a very tolerant vegan watching someone barbeque in his backyard.
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