Several years ago I hears the words come out my mouth “I’m yelling at you because I care” (the follow-up realization that it wasn’t the case, that I’d had my hot buttons successfully pushed is another story of that ex-friend) however there’s some truth in that what makes one angry, what one is reactive about is an indicator.
An indicator that one is too personally involved to see straight. An indicator that one is distorted and needs to step away for time out. But also an indicator as I intuitively said, that indifference is lack of caring and analness about distinctions is a sign of engagement even when it comes out as curmudgeonlyness.
Strong feelings against are the same coin as feelings towards. Hubby laughs when I get too sputtering mad at the vice grip headache as I rant again against something that purports itself to be a poem.
Why would that be a poem? (I won’t point to anywhere in particular since it is so common.)
Why is it a communication at all? What is the reader to get out of it? Someone feels vague emotions under such vague sky of the colour so grey. What does that add? What could even the writer get out of it? Why is Grice’s principles so ignored? (inform accurate things in an effective way briefly to the relevant person without saying too much or too little.)
No hard-won astute understandings. No particular experience added to the human collective to illustrate any principle nor to spin old principle. No ambiguity and a tight click shut without any real exploration past the gate.
Everything doesn’t have to be clever zing or with a point or play in the phonemes yards but none of that and no form and no reduction of language or experience. It takes longer to get thru the sentence on page than it did for the words to come into existence in real time. What’s the point?
The thing that confounds me most is to find not one poem like this, but that dozens that win some best-of, and there’s a whole book the same, or sets of people with 6 or more books that say what exactly? to decades of polite applause.
Are my eyes not adjusted to the light level gradient to distinguish something? What am I missing out of where people get a gain from reading it? I am looking too hard perhaps. My bar is set too high. It isn’t meant to be Poetry, just a poem pitter-pattered away at by a serious amateur audience or one who writes for amateur non-literary readers. It’s a way. It is good for distinct ways to be rewarded. That doesn’t mean its in my cut of cloth to read or participate in this variant. It’s out of reach to appreciate it.