I made this site because i like poetry and wanted to make a site about it. I hate it when people get carried away with intellectual nonsense and can't just step back and appreciate poetry as an art fom. Walt Whitman beautifully portrays this idea in a piece titled "When I heard the learn'd astronomer":
when i heard the learn'd astronomer
when the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me
when i was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them
when i sitting heard the astronomer where he
lectured with much applause in the lecture room
how soon unaccountable i became tired and sick
till rising and gliding out i wander'd off by myself
in the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time
look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
Whitman's perfect silence is perhaps the truest of all appreciations. At the end of the day, this is how we should be approaching this art form. Every person is capable of expressing themselves: some choose poetry. I've put lots of poems, essays, links, and other related things into this site, so if thats your thing, enjoy.
Here's a poem by Billy Collins. Though it may seem corny at first glance, I think that it wonderfully expresses a view on poetry that is too often overlooked.
--Introduction to Poetry--
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
* * *
Here's one that I wrote. I'm sure it stills needs revision but I think that it expresses my point on this issue of poetry appreciation. Its titled "In These Seeing Eyes":
i.
the green surrounds me,
swallowed by its cool breath
verdant and vast
screaming from every hill top
valley,
and rock at my feet
growing from this trembling earth.
ii.
ezra pound once called
God
the great asthete,
but i see a meaning
infused in the sight around me
that beauty could
never reach.
iii.
and thinking back
to that stumbling haystack-
or was it a lilypad?
i know
there is no beauty in art
but a universe of perplexity
in every stroke
the painter would find
in this scene
iv.
all i see is green.
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