Poetry is a Hoax

    My appetite for poetry is limited.  Over the last couple years, I've read some Charles Bukowski, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Lee Masters, and Wilfred Owen.  All of them penned some good stuff.  All of them also penned some stuff that left my head in a daze.

    I think the problem with (serious) poetry is that it is inherently obscure.  If you want to write something straightforward, you do a short story.  But obscurity carries the risk that no one will see through the fog you've deliberately created.  And reading page after page of pea-soup prose gets old fast.

    So I think I'll skip Goat's book of William Wordsworth poems.  And Emily Dickinson.  And especially Robert Frost.  I note in passing I've yet to read any poetry in 2011.  I think I'll ask for a Shel Silverstein book for Christmas.