Simple but Good?
"God, I feel so guilty."
"For what I asked?"
"For being the catalyst of so much bad poetry." He lamented.
"Look," I said, angered and a bit hurt, "I just thought since you wrote poetry, you might just want to read some of mine, besides, I know it's not great, I just whipped it up."
"No, no, your poem's fine, in fact I like it." He lied. "It's just that I feel like people read my poetry, and they connect with what I'm saying, but since they don't see the method... they don't see my style, so they assume the there isn't one, that there's no talent or hard work in writing simple but good poems. Then out they come with these overly contrived, fifteen line monstrosities that not only have no content, but worse, don't flow."
He looked at me as though waiting for my sympathetic tears, for me to comfort the poor, great but unknown poet who is surrounded on all sides by no-talent idiots like myself.
"Well, it's not like you're Robert Frost or anything, I mean the bad poetry he inspired must have been much more insulting."
"Frost sucks," he said, oblivious to my barb. "If I hear one more person tell me that 'The Road Less Traveled' is their favorite poem, I think I'll puke. It's there in every second rate, seventh-grade English textbook and that's the only reason these people like it. It's the only poem they've ever read. And then they say they relate to it? How? How can everyone take the road less travelled and we still end up with Sidney Sheldon a millionaire, and poetry next to impossible to sell? Introduce these idiots to Whitman, or Hughes, or Auden or Rumi. God, introduce these fools to Rumi and watch their heads spin. Then, maybe they'll start down a less travelled road. Huh," he sighed, "have you read any Rumi?"
"No," I managed to squeak out in my outrage at the insults to my favorite poem. He doesn't understand, he couldn't understand 'The Road Less Traveled' because he's so tied up in being an artist that he doesn't know how to think for himself, he just does whatever's bohemian.
"Oh you should, he has such insight, thirteenth century Persian, but it seems as modern as the Pompideau. It's hard to believe they didn't make a religion out of him." He said, still ignoring my anger, and losing coherence. So I made an excuse to leave before he got any worse, and it's like he didn't even hear me, he just kept droning on about some other writer. Even though he followed me to the door, I doubt he noticed me leaving.
It seems like every conversation we have goes like that; for the first half hour or so he'll be his usual over-opinionated, but otherwise sane self, and then boom, he'll get started on a rant and he starts talking complete nonsense like he's trying to impress you with how much of an intellectual he is, like he's this great poetic genius and you're just an idiot. Well, I might not have read all the books he says he has but I know one thing that he doesn't. I know my poem is bad, but he has no idea that his is (at least compared to a real poet like Robert Frost), so like the man said, I'm smarter because I know I can't and he thinks he can.
I might still read those guys that he said, except for the thirteenth century one, I don't really like all those thee's and thou's. In fact, that's what turns me off of reading poetry.
10/22/95
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