God Loves His Children

We're doing our poetry unit in Introductory Literature class right now.

I've always hated poetry. I hate reading it, I hate writing it and I hate thinking about it.

The biggest reason I hate it, is that I can't ever derive any kind of meaning out of it unless it's really obvious. I can breeze through Faulkner, McCarthy, Nabakov, Pynchon and many other complex writers, but I can't really ever get anything out of poetry I read. It's meaningless to me.

I want to know why this is. We read a poem by Sylvia Plath called 'Mushrooms,' and it didn't mean anything to me at all.

My teacher just asked "Why did Updike choose to use this particular rhyme scheme?"

Hell if I know! I couldn't figure out that the poem was about a piano until the class came to a consensus on that.

There's just no hope for the last third of this class.