Do you not really enjoy Poetry?

Tell me why you don't.

I don't really either, except for a few, one of which is in my sig line, and a poetry loving friend wants to know why. He simply can't wrap his mind around why I read, and love, so much in the way of "classic" fiction yet shy away from poetry.

What are my reasons? Maybe I'm just not able to generate a love for a work until 100 pages are gone? I don't rightly know why, I just don't.

Perhaps my mind doesn't process the lyrical qualities of poetry as well as the straight up, and irregular, tempo of prose?

Maybe because it isn't the way people generally talk:shrug:

Get this, my grad school major (Ph.D.) was in Russian lit, and my dissertation topic was some futurist poet/writer. But, I really don't like poetry. Cheap, childish verse is one thing, but something that's supposed to be meaningful is usually beyond me. Same reason as you: it's not the way people talk. Iambic pentameter-schmexameter--don't care for it.

Just for starters,they can tell the human condition.

Strange, I am. I much prefer prose. Whenever I see poetry written, I just scan it and move on to the synopsis. But, as I mentioned earlier, did my Ph.d. work in lit... primarily on a poet. Go figure.
:shrug:

and Shel Silverstein. That's about it. What more is there anyway?

On edit, I actually do like the poem

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes. It really does paint a nice picture.

Does that make me a selfish, egotistical bastard?

That's OK though because I get the feeling that DU has it's fair share of egotists:-)

I had to look, then I looked away
at something else
at someone elses thoughts
were they mine?
I couldn't say.

Walking with myself alone
I'm thinking of a story I read
of a cell phone
that ended up in a pile of litter
alone.

So many words had been said
How many wished they had said
instead?

I guess that's the way people
usually talk and then
look away
I had something to say, but then
they weren't listening then
again.

It is like a tornado, the strong ones just smack you upside the head and move on. A novel is like a long drenching rain.

here is some more stuff you probably won't like then...

http://65.64.114.185/poetry_files.html

it is a trap that has swallowed lesser talented individuals who have been incapable of distilling the music of speech into the written and spoken word. The Academy is destroying poetry, it is turning it into a field of MFA teachers, MFA degrees and workshops, it is a field where writers survive by teaching or grants (they don't need to sell a ticket, hence it is deadly boring and out of touch), editors of the magazines write great reviews of each others work so they will be published by the person they are reviewing (who is also an editor of a small magazine). Or they will bilk you into fee based contests in the name of professionalism. An equally banal trend is the "Def Jam Poetry" posing and mugging, and ridiculous "slam" readings that put a phony rough-house glamor onto the words. I save my most derision for those who read NO poetry have no knowledge or feeling for words, BUT love ROCK N ROLL or HIP HOP lyrics and think that is enough to make them a poet. It is not.

That said, I love poetry. I rarely go a day without reading it, or about it. I have attended countless hideous poetry readings, edited thousands of poetasters poems as a favor, written poems for TV documentaries, read at Strip-Clubs and Symposiums; and yet it is the thing, craft, and history I love. I even have taken vacations based on poetry: Emily Dickinson's house, Verlaine and Rimbaud's haunts. I dream of Shelley and have skinny dipped with Allen Ginsberg and some other famous poets who no one ever heard of (sorry for ending that sentence with a preposition--but this is just a rant of a man who loves diagramming sentences and metrically scanning newspaper articles.)

Poetry should never be spoon fed like medicine--if you don't like it don't read it.