I’ve never liked poetry writing.

Even past my hate for writing (the action, not the field) and the arts (the field, not the action), poetry rates real low.

This is because I personally don’t like putting meaning onto things that might not have that meaning. Of course, it’s subjective what you think this or that means in a poem, but not when you’re in a class for it. When you have poetry as a class, you can be objectively graded for something subjective. No matter how correct you might be in the literal sense (as in, your accuracy to the poem writer’s intentions), you could potentially get a bad grade for lack of effort.

Who are we to say a poem means anything at all? Poetry always has this pretentious air that also lingers around psychics, the stench of someone lying to you through their teeth with vague meanings and indirect statements. No matter how simplistic or convoluted or direct a sentence is, it could have an infinite amount of meanings that other people will never understand in a million years.

Maybe the argument against that is “Well maybe it’s your fault for writing something vague”; in that case, why do poems have to be analyzed when for the majority of them, we don’t have an author’s account for what it literally means? If the goal is to become better analysts for poems, there should be some kind of objective bar to reach.

This is all coming from someone who combs through video game lore to find tiny tidbits of information to weave entire stories out of, but I’m not graded on that. The school experience with nearly everything based in creativity has ironically decreased my appreciation for any of it. For god’s sake, there are art classes and art colleges; you can get a literal degree for something based in subjectivity.

There’s a reason art majors are the butt of so many school jokes, and it’s because the school system is trying to objectify art. I know artists that dropped out of college because they decided that they didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars for a chance to sit in a class, all while a teacher derides their every effort. Past that, I know even more artists that gave up the craft entirely because college turned their passion into busywork.

The further you search, the deeper my connections go; they document every kind of artist you could possibly find. All this and I can confidently say I hate poetry and I hate it for the poets. Poetry is art, and we will never know how many people like Van Gogh or Michelangelo the system has killed because they feel the same way as I do: absolutely loathing every moment I’m forced to say what someone else’s work means.

..

Besides that, this class is neat.

I think the grades are lenient enough to actually let creative people be creative.