15 - i do not get poetry
For MicroBlogVember
I once attended a lecture on poetry by Amal El-Mohtar, co-author of This Is How You Lose the Time War (which I haven't read and will likely come up again in about a week and a half). I don't remember much of it, but she put two columns on the board - "Poetry" and "Prose" - and asked the attendees what kinds of devices, techniques, or characteristics belonged on either side. By the end of it, I wanted to say, "I don't see any reason prose can't also do most of the things we put on the poetry side," but I didn't. It took several more minutes for this concept to come up in the content of the lecture.
Anyway, I broadly concluded that what makes poetry poetry is not necessarily its rhythm or metre or syllables or what have you, but the vibes. Does it feel like poetry? If so, congratulations.
Doesn't mean I get it, though.
---