Poetry Packets and trying to understand

During class we went through and read a packet full of poetry.  The one thing about poetry is how it rarely makes any sense to me.  An example of just how confusing poetry can be is with the poem on page 6 of the PDF packet.  Firstly, I don’t get why the author designed the poem in that manner.  If I was to take a shot in the dark about the purpose of the poem, I would say that a singularity pulls in everything and jumbles matter up.  Maybe the author put the poem in that manner to represent ideas getting sucked into a singularity (black hole).  I do admit that there are times that poetry does make sense, especially when it’s talking about a politics and social injustice.   

Dream Boogie really drove its point in the way Dream Boogie was structured.  I figure there is a hidden meaning in the way the author chose the words like “ain’t you heard” or a “dream deferred”, but since I don’t really know anything about the author I can only make connection on my own experiences.  The author probably used the word “ain’t” to show a socio-economic background of the kid talking to his dad.  The kid in the poem is probably from a neighborhood that has seen better times.  Using the term “a dream deferred” was a really interesting combination since the term “deferred” means to postpone, but since the author later uses the word “ain’t” the use of the word “deferred” in interesting and seems to put more emphasis on how this kids dreams are postponed.  When I read this poem I wonder what dream the kid had and why is it getting “deferred”. 

Now when I read poetry, usually for a class, I imagine that not all have some political agenda but are written just for a “food for thought” manner.  Food for thought is what I got when I read the poem “And What Do You Get”.  The poem goes through and switches a bunch of words around to demonstrate how easily a words meaning can change if certain letters were removed.  For example, the author takes the word “therapist” and asks you to remove the “the” and when you look at the end result you get “rapist”.  The author even drives the point by talking about the “id”, which is the instinctual part of a person’s mind (in Freudian psychology).  When I finished reading the poem, there wasn’t any feeling of “wow that sucks or we need to change society” but instead I had the feeling of “that’s interesting or yeah I knew that”.  The reaction I had to the poem is probably what the author wanted but since I don’t know the author I’m just guessing.

During class, we talked about what is a poem and the different structure that go into making a poem.  While the class was listing off the various “things” that go into a poem, I was trying to absorb all the different ideas since my major is completely on the opposite end of writing poetry.  The reading with Goldberg though really helped to put into perspective the ideas of writing.  The author mentions “Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important.” When I read this, the pass discussions in class started to make a little more sense.  Just because poetry doesn’t make sense to everyone, including me, doesn’t make it any less important.  Writing in general is about trying to understand or even record what’s happening around us and poems like “And What Do You Get” kind of help emphasize that point.  Though in my defense, the understanding of where the various authors are coming from, when writing poetry, would help immensely.  The reason knowing about the author is important (for me) is that by knowing the history, I can then put the poem into context (or at least attempt to).