No matter where you are from, you certainly studied some poems. We hear about poems from a really young age. And to this day, I haven’t met a lot of people that truly enjoy poetry. So many individuals find poems boring, cheesy or hard to read. But you are unaware that you’ve savoured a poem before, without even realizing! Lads and lasses, allow me to present to you my unpopular opinion about poems!
Poems are everywhere!
You’ve fallen in love with so many poems! You don’t believe it? Countless songs (but not all of them) are poems. The musical notes and lyrics are poems written on sound waves. There has to be at least one song, one verse of a song that has caught your attention. Thousands of hours of listening, hundreds of notes, dozens of lyrics, they’ve surely drunken you. If I had to name one quote from these patterned poems, I’d choose a simple verse from one of Gorillaz songs, in collaboration with slowthai and Slaves. “There is a hole in your pocket so you cannot find the change”. It’s such a simple verse; I’ve fallen in love with it!
Poetry is anywhere. I remember being so captivated with a poem that I’ve “read” in one of my Catalan literature classes. It was the work of Joan Brossa, a visual poet. This poem is, in fact, a light bulb that has the word “poema” written on. I’ve had to do an essay about this poem, and let me tell you, it was so weird. No verses, no rhythm, no rhyme or reason, how could I write an essay about it? My curiosity and imagination got the best of me and somehow ideas started flowing. Of course, I had to include some of my bad pun (could have been PUNished for it though!) I don’t know why, but this intriguing poem made me write things I haven’t even thought about before. Quite a nice experience, it lit up a light bulb in my head.
Not all poems are romantic, cheesy or boring
Why is everyone immediately associating poetry with Romanticism? It became some sort of stereotype that poems are either about love or nature, death or patriotism. And so many people try to decode every single word from a poem. We teach our students to do so, but why? I think it’s because of a subconscious fear of not knowing, of living in the “dark”. Honestly, a lot of poems are total chaos, clusters of random thoughts and ideas. Some of them are really gross, even perverted. So, why do we try to decode them? Most mysteries lose their captivating and strange characteristic if people try to reveal their ”meaning”. Oh, and by the way, a lot of them have no meaning – at all. Just like a ton of songs, drawings, paintings, sculptures and creations in general have no meaning.
Here comes the interesting part: you can either give the poem a meaning, interpret them in your own way or deepen the chaos. And the second choice is a hit or miss, since a lot of people don’t even think about creating organized chaos. Even though it might seem like there are a lot of rules when it comes to poetry, the big fat truth says otherwise. Rules were created to be broken, so why don’t you give it a try? In the end, I’m hoping that my unpopular opinion about poems isn’t that unpopular.
