If I Knew Something About Poetry...

by T.M. Wright

A young man I know thinks he’s one of the world’s great poets. He writes earnest love poetry to the most current object of his affections and he reads this poetry to me with great pride. He believes that he has a gift and that his successes with a well-known—some say infamous—poetry website prove it. The young man is sixteen and, in my estimation, writes poetry just like the earnest, love-struck and literarily presumptuous young man that he is; in other words, I think his poems are not very good, though I know that the young women to whom he writes them are thrilled.

If I knew something about poetry I would say categorically that the young man’s poems are just plain bad. But I can’t say that, categorically, because they do communicate—in a non-prose way—his love and passion. And I can’t say, either, that his love and passion need to mature a bit before he can write good love poems. Heck, I’ve read lots of “bad” love poetry in my career as an editor, and most of it comes from adults. But even those “bad” love poems communicate, too. They communicate, primarily, with the person for whom they were written, the person who best knows the poet and the poet’s feelings. Do these poems need to communicate with English professors and the editors of stuffy and boring literary magazines in order to have “value?”

The market for “good” poetry is far, far smaller than the market for “bad” poetry, just as the market for paintings by Thomas—“Painter of Light”—Kincaid is far greater than anything Andrew Wyeth or Potter or even Rembrandt did. This isn’t news. The popular culture, as it pertains to the arts and literature, reflects the “popular” taste. And the “popular taste” makes us eggheads cringe.

Does the fact that we cringe have any value?

-- TMW
©2000 T.M. Wright

T.M. Wright may or may not be an egghead, but he likes eggs, especially if they’re scrambled, and come with wheat toast and home fries, at Jine’s Restaurant in Rochester. He is also the semi-competent editor of Writer Online (a magazine recently chosen by Writer’s Digest as the number-two website on the net for people seeking publication).