06-28-2011, 10:19 AM
What concerns me most is that many people who have this "I don't need to improve, I'm already wonderful" attitude are the same people who will admit to never having read anyone else's poems (other than those written by their friends on a website, that is). That's probably the poetry equivalent of auditions for Pop Idol, or drawing a smiley face in the dust of someone's car window.
A love of poetry begins with reading it. Reading poetry is difficult for a lot of people -- it doesn't always follow nice simple rules like prose, and sometimes it's hard to work out just what's being said. For the instant-feedback generation of Twitter and reality tv, this seems like a big problem. Learning to use your own brain instead of having things explained to you, or instead of the answers being so blatant it's like being bludgeoned... that's not easy. It seems that the world has gotten so fond of dumbing things down, we've forgotten that if you expect so little of people they're going to live down to your expectations. Set the bar a little higher, have a goal beyond the bleeding obvious and at least a few people will try to reach it, if they're given a bit of a hand up.
And never forget that we were all beginners once.
A love of poetry begins with reading it. Reading poetry is difficult for a lot of people -- it doesn't always follow nice simple rules like prose, and sometimes it's hard to work out just what's being said. For the instant-feedback generation of Twitter and reality tv, this seems like a big problem. Learning to use your own brain instead of having things explained to you, or instead of the answers being so blatant it's like being bludgeoned... that's not easy. It seems that the world has gotten so fond of dumbing things down, we've forgotten that if you expect so little of people they're going to live down to your expectations. Set the bar a little higher, have a goal beyond the bleeding obvious and at least a few people will try to reach it, if they're given a bit of a hand up.
And never forget that we were all beginners once.
It could be worse