On My Reasons for Hating Poetry


I hated poetry for years without any really good reason. The whole genre seemed so needlessly complex. If you want to say something, just say it plainly instead of telling me in a rhyming allegory about building fences. I can trace it all back to my second grade advanced writing class. We had to write a poem. Mine was only a few lines. Two of them were, "Roy lost a toy/He found it with a ploy." My mom helped me find a word that rhymed with 'toy,' and I just found out what 'ploy' means a couple years ago. The most impressive poem in advanced writing was a girl's that went (and I hope I'm not infringing on any copyrights here paraphrasing it): "Proud saguaro/dusty saguaro/lonely saguaro/...proud saguaro." I just found out what a 'saguaro' is last year; it's a cactus. I would argue from a critical standpoint that using 'cactus' instead of 'saguaro' would have made the poem more accessible to our non-advanced writing friends while not detracting from the meaning of the poem.

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