Andrey's questions about poems (split from the intro thread)

[RiverNotch]

I like stir fries.  They are quick, nutritious and delicious.  I also like slow-cooked lamb shanks.  They take a long time to fully develop flavour but are nutritious and delicious.  

Ultimately I get the same out of both meals.  They are not the same.  One is not better than the other -- they are for different moods, seasons, situations.  

You can't slow-cook a stir fry.  It becomes tough and unpalatable, and loses its essence of freshness.  You can't stir fry a lamb shank.  Sinew doesn't break down and the fat has no time to render into flavour, so it just remains an unresolved pile of chunky, stringy goo.  

Novels and poems, while both written and ultimately delivering nutrition of similar value, are different.  This is not a competition.

What does a metaphor look like, to the metablind?

Maybe read the Metabarons? That book's the metashit -- I mean, from what I've heard, a father/mother taking the male brain of his child and stuffing it into the child's twin sister, forming the perfect androgyne!

Yeah, I couldn't resist. On a tangential note: anyone got a copy of that book? Really wanna read it.

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^ Is that what you think of guys like novelists? Do you think they waste words?

I said that the difference between a poem and a novel is akin to a bullet to the head or cancer. They both kill you.

You've said more than that. You said: "In prose you sift through wasted words to get meaning, ... ." Hence the point I've made about novelists.

You said you can't get ANY meaning out of poems, eg, they are nothing but a waste of words.

These are not the words I used, nor do they precisely convey what I meant. What I had in mind was the perceived need to obscure the meaning of the poem. This does sound like an irrational stance, true (I should have thought it through the first time I posted on this forum). However, my main concern remains to be: why metaphors?

It's not so much a reading comprehension problem as it is my problem with what is at the foundation of poetry. My argument is this: why does a poet feel the need to use metaphors when we already have prose? Why contrive a confusing piece of literature and make the reader work hard on its meaning when it is only supposed to convey an idea? What practical  advantage do metaphors have over simple terms?

Gut punch, plus technical terms on how red something is are simply not literary, plus the idea of qualias and abstract thoughts being concretized for understanding. Even good prose has a tendency towards metaphor. And it's not contrived if it was considered literature before basically any other literary work. 

God, if you have to learn about the advantages of metaphor in the internet, then what the hell is up with the state of education today?