Why Does Poetry Have to Be So Confusing?!

Well, after another week of reading poems from our poetry packets, and also reading the first half of City Eclogue, I'd have to say that I'm more confused then ever about poetry. No matter how many times I go back through and re-read what we went over in class, it just goes in one ear and out the other. I don't know how so many people in the class can understand what the poems are about. To me, it seems like the poets just threw some words together and decided to call it a poem.

I tend to think more in terms of what stuff literally means. I'm not good at being an abstract thinker. There weren't many poems that I understood from the first half of the book. There were, however, a few different lines that when I thought about it I feel like I kind of understood it. I still think that I'm only thinking about it in a literal sense, but at least something stuck with me.

One of the lines was on page 48 where it said "arrested for what they mouthed off against." It makes me think about how people have always had to watch what they say because they can end up getting in trouble for it. Like take school for example, I had a teacher once where if you said something they didn't like, even if it was just you didn't think that their idea of what the author meant by saying something was the only thing the author meant, you'd get in a lot of trouble and be lectured about why you were wrong. That's just one of the many examples where people have to watch what they say.

Another line that I actually somewhat understood what the author was saying is on pg 56 where it says "he woke in a fight for his life in that he went at the alarm clock as if to kill." This made me think of where sometimes people have bad dreams and in the middle of a really bad part of that dream, when your alarm clock goes off, it scares you so you lunge towards the alarm clock because it scared you so bad. Going at the alarm clock like you're going to kill it is a normal response if it scared you that bad.

Overall, I'm still not getting the whole concept of poetry and I'm still struggling greatly to understand it, but I'm happy I was able to take something away from the book even if it was only understanding two or three lines.