"Poetry was an attempt to dig into the buried stuff inside a person’s psyche."
— Zhang, Jenny
Author
Work Title
Date
July 1, 2015
Metaphor
"Poetry was an attempt to dig into the buried stuff inside a person’s psyche."
Metaphor in Context
My school’s Martha Dumptruck frequently submitted poems to our literary journal of which I was on the editorial board. I thought her poetry was terrible. I was so embarrassed for her. What I knew about poetry in high school was that it was both hard to understand and completely open to interpretation. I was told that a poem could really mean anything. Poems could have grammatical mistakes, they could give a fuck about narrative or the space-time continuum or reality as we knew it. Poetry was an attempt to dig into the buried stuff inside a person’s psyche. It used dream logic instead of the logic of our waking lives. Poems were sputtered by demons not sprung out of morality. In other words, poems were deep shit, and they were also anything at all (this became clearer the further I strayed from my high school’s poetry curriculum): a single word (lighght), symbols and signs (Hannah Weiner’s code poems), phrases that a child learning to speak might say (a rose is a rose is a rose), words that have been uttered a zillion times (I love thee / you), a blank page, a collage, an erasure, a Google spam filter, whatever. But if that was the case, if poems could be anything at all, then why is the default to cringe whenever someone writes a poem about their feelings? Even worse if that someone is a teenager? Even worse if that someone is no longer a teenager but nonetheless thinks about themselves with the kind of intensity that is only acceptable between the ages of thirteen and nineteen?
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Jenny Zhang, "How if Feels,"Poetry (July 1, 2015). <Link to Poetry Magazine>
Date of Entry
04/07/2016
