One Pointless Essay on the Virtues of Terrible Poems

There is a certain advantage that comes to poetry that probably doesn’t make itself evident to the casual on looker. Poetry is not a national best seller, and tends to rank pretty low near the bottom in recreational reading material. It is hardly a surprise when any reaction I receive from this page is a mix of “nice photos” or “um, yeah, your poetry.” This lack of enthusiasm is hardly a deterrent, and I’m not offended. I’m not a faithful fan of the art form myself, yet I owe this more to my deficient attention span than a lacking of appreciation.

The nature of the poem is complicated. Unlike a piece of prose that expresses an idea directly, and leaves little room for interpretation, the brevity of the poem evokes ambiguity. It requires the reader to not be passive and accepting, but aggressive and questioning in order for its picture, its feeling and its idea to unfold. The best poems leave you scratching your head.

I by no means feel my attempts at becoming a bard are anything worth bragging about. Rather it is the opposite. I battle the urge to delete everything I’ve ever scribbled down, and run away and hide out of embarrassment. It may be that I am my own worst critic, or it may be my fear of writing the very sort of rambling I can’t stand, which is known as “personal” poetry. It is that sort of drivel that every brooding teenager has scribbled in her diary late at night under the covers, which always bears the stench of “oh woe is me.” This self-absorption combined with just bad writing in general makes for the bulk of poems produced, and mercifully the majority are never inflicted on another human being. When they are, the results are disastrous.

Despite a fear towards my own work, there is a freedom provided within the veiled communication of the poem that I can’t resist. My other writing may be more reader-friendly, with a beginning, middle and end and an amusing antidote or two, but there is a great deal of self-censorship going on while I’m composing. I am too concerned over the feelings of others to mention them in passing, and I wind up censoring my own work so it is more palatable. Within a poem there are no restrictions, and the opposite takes place. I’m somehow more exposed, and it only requires someone taking an effort to read the poem for the picture to emerge. Say like one of those computer generated 3-D pictures you used to buy at the mall. It was an effort to learn to relax the eyes, but once it occurred, suddenly there was a picture of a boat floating among all of that white noise.

So as the majority of people who have looked at this page have only found the photos worth noting, I find it amusing that even those people failed to notice everything I posted. Perhaps because the majority of the content is poetry, most didn’t bother to look through each post to discover that there is an actual photo of my naked breast hidden among the other arty shots. If anyone noticed it, they never mentioned it. Or they may have seen it and not realized what is was they were looking at. It is there, and I was thrilled the day I posted it. The idea of part of me being naked on the Internet is slightly exhilarating, and it goes so much against my own desire to remain hidden from sight. Perhaps that’s why I love it so much. It is the same way I can say something painfully truthful in a poem, yet because it is wrapped around words that will go mostly unread, the message is never discovered. In a literary sense, I’m a flasher. If you read my poetry, you might see tits.