Okay so my blog post this week concerns Margaret Avison, and her collection of poems. I want to make one thing clear right from the start. I hate poetry, I always have. I never understood why it exists, and why people seem so interested in deciphering the words and magically have a life changing experience as a result. I could never understand it, or read through the language to some “deeper meaning”. I have never felt anything from reading poetry, except maybe a bit of dizziness from being so confused and bored. After a student’s rebuttal of points discussed in lecture, Professor Ogden said on the class blog,
“I think that hating something literary is clean & good: lukewarm indifference is the only response that I regret being the cause of.”
I believe I fall into the category of “clean & good”.
Don’t get me wrong, I have complete respect for Margaret Avison and her approach with poetry. For some people, poetry is their emotional release. Avison was simply trying to relate her emotions. The problem I have concerns her method for relaying these emotions to other people. For an average person such as myself, and a lot of other students I’m sure, it is very difficult to read through all the thick, confusing language to make some sort of sense out of the whole thing. I mean, why not just state your ideas and feelings in plain, simple language that other people can relate to? Seriously, I would really like to know how many people who have tried to read Avison’s work immediately understood the deeper meanings similar to those that Professor Ogden raised in lecture. I was genuinely surprised to see the things that he wringed out of Avison’s complex language. The ideas themselves were quite insightful. I believe that a beautiful place like the country we live in deserves to be celebrated and reflected upon. But when it requires a professor who has had years of experience and has the knowledge to tell you thhis, it becomes a hassle. I would much rather read something that I can interpret for myself. After all, isn’t that what post-secondary education encourages, original thought?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I agree with Jared and his thoughts about understanding Margaret Avison's poems without doubt. They are terribly difficult to interpret the way Dr. Ogden analyzes them, since most of the comments he stated about the deeper meanings of these poems were quite shocking and hidden to me. This part of English became just like any other boring class, full of memorization, cause if English cannot even encourage original thought and requires a professor to tell you what you should think, then how is it any different from any other class?
I agree with both of you. The poetry section was way over my head. When Dr. Ogden analyzed certain words such as "still" and got these ideas from lines of Avison's poems I was lost and confused almost every time. I think this disconnection with the course material led to the difficulty many of us might have experienced in finding interest within the poetry section.
I agree with you that writing should be expressed in an easy to understand way and that this is necessary if a writer wants to transmit their ideas to readers. For me, poetry doesn’t exist for that purpose; it is a kind of writing style for authors to use in order to express their feelings. As a result, different people can appreciate poetry in different ways and there is not a "right" interpretation for every poem. I think that this is the only way I can try to imagine the complex and ambiguous meanings that a poem might have.
Post a Comment