How Poetry and Math Intersect

But I don't feel anything from poetry.

I've described it as like being tone-deaf but to poetry. The majority of poems make me feel nothing, and the ones where I do feel something is more because of the story than because it's in the form of a poem. I think that for the poems I do feel an emotional response to, I could experience the same emotional response without the form of the poem as long as the same story was there.

One of the few poems I felt an emotional response towards was Shel Silverstein's "Masks" that I read as a kid. It was a short poem and I think I responded to it because of the story it told, and not necessarily because of the form.

I wonder if you feel similarly. Do you feel something towards poems that tell a compelling story or do you never feel any emotional response to anything written in the form of a poem?

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that most people have very particular taste in poetry. (So particular that some people might never discover their own!) It doesn't help that there is a lot of bad poetry out there, as well as poetry that might be good in some superficial "academic" sense, like you described, but doesn't produce any reaction in the reader.

There's also the fact that reading poetry is so different from reading regular prose, and it can take some getting used to. It took me several re-readings before poems that I now love first started to "click."

For me, it all started with discovering Nabokov's novels last summer -- his writing sparked an appreciation of prose and imagery that I never experienced before, despite being a lifetime reader. I read that he loved Keats, so I picked a few of Keats's best-known poems and read them over and over, until I internalized them and eventually came to love them. As I've explored other poets, I find that the more I read, the more I become sensitive to. But still, I'd say that 80% of the poetry I encounter (especially modern stuff) leaves me feeling stupid and insensitive, at least after the first couple readings. Better than the 99% a year ago, though!

EDIT: I went through something similar with classical music a couple years ago. Despite being a musician and music lover, I could just never get into it. I immersed myself in it for a few months and began to see/feel the beauty in it. I think it's just a very different way of approaching music compared to modern genres and structures, kind of like how poetry is fundamentally different from the novels most of us grow up reading.

Last year, I started listening to a Spanish rock band called Extremoduro (Spanish is my native language). I was captivated by the lyrics, I loved how the songwriter mixed delicate phrases with shocking and sometimes even impudent language. Robe, the singer & songwriter said:

>Bueno, yo me reivindico más como poeta porque lo que más quiero ser es poeta. Hacer una música, bueno, sí, está bien, pero hacer una letra para mí es mucho más difícil, es donde está una canción".

>(I claim myself as a poet, because being a poet is what I want the most. Making music, well, it's alright, but writing lyrics, for me, is much harder, because the lyrics is what makes the song).

This band alone has triggered an unsuspected interest in poetry for me.

I also find it somewhat difficult to get into poetry. I don't know why I've been so patient with it. Maybe it's because I was never in a position of being expected to "get" it like you were.

As for what makes me like a poem, it's similar to what makes me like a song. I'll find myself repeating some small phrases of the poem to myself because I like them so much. Personally, I think listening to people read poems was what helped to convince me that there's something valuable in poetic language. I know there's a bit of elitism about wanting to hear something read to you instead of reading it yourself, but I'm sure Greek rhapsodes didn't feel the same way about reciting The Odyssey.

Cann't right now think of anything I know by a proper poet in English, but consider for example Leonard Cohen's

The Maestro says it's Mozart

But it sounds like bubble gum

When you're waiting

For the miracle, for the miracle to come

How much did he tell you in just those 4 lines? More importantly, have ever noticed the particular phenomenon described here? Now you have it in words, and you'll be able to notice it next time. I don't mean you specifically here, but just to convey the point.

That's poetry to me, not so much about "emotion", just noticing and expressing somewhat subtle facets of life. Because at the time this was written this was not a particularly new or subtle insight, that wasn't "true" poetry. Still a good song though.

I'm surely missing some great stuff, but I support your feeling of not getting it.

I have a baseless conviction though that it's a combination of 1. unavailability and 2. pop tastes.

On 1: If I spent 10 hours reading random (short) poetry I'm absolutely sure I'd find something that clicked, but there's no place I'm aware of where you can read a selection of poetry like that (unlike youtube and bandcamp, where I can choose from a thousand songs in a thousand genres in seconds). At best there's old php sites where the shallowest dabblers upload. And there's no ambient exposure, like when you walk by a radio or hear something nice in an advertisement.

On 2: No studies, but there's a lot of discussion about the popularity of free verse (what you'll mostly find on the above sites), decline of meter, rhyme patterns, etc. So even when I spend an hour trying to read here and there, that's all I got.

You'll find a decent amount of fantasy verse in books and games, although I'm not sure how well it stands on its own. Maybe there's other fields where poetry can spontaneously occur? Grad school whiteboards?

Those four simple words are funny and beautiful, simultaneously absurd and reasonable. To me this is poetry. Elegance, in the mathematical sense, only the problem space is describing things, rather than proving them.

Rather than not "getting" poetry, I think you can settle for simply arguing that it isn't poetry, or that you don't like it. Surely though, with a degree in creative writing, you've found something to be poetic.