CONFESSIONS OF A POETIC DUNDERHEAD.

WHY DOES reading Poetry have to be such a tiresome exercise? Do you have to get a Pound-ing headache just by going through a poem(if so then it is easier for me to bang my head on the wall, its faster, gives a more thorough headache) Do you have to spend hours trying to figure out what each dialogized word means, as it can mean 150 thousand things? (what a Wasteland of brains, filling a crossword takes similar time and is more refreshing and not so frustrating) Do words have to be cryptic to be poetic?

I must confess that I have resigned myself in the last couple of years reading poetry that doesn’t kill my brain cells from over exhaustion. Weldon Kees collection of poetry is a favourite, dark though not depressing (unlike, lets say, Philip Lurkin’s) and simple (not simplistic), vivid, dramatic, almost like watching a play (let the stage reveal the logic of (my) destiny). My most favourite is Muhammad Al Maghut, whose Fan of Swords doesn’t kill but cools my brain from metres and stanzas and everything. Even in translation it still is poetry. And Caroline Nderitu. And rap/genge/bongoflava from Dandora and K-south and Dar.

I guess then for the love of the overtly rebellious poetry (both politically and artistically) I am a pessimistic person, and yes, I believe art can’t save anyone and anything and that so far it has been over rated (as the solver of worlds problems,) but isn’t it refreshing to read poetic prose and prose-sounding poems(proems?) That are colourful in language and vivid and direct rather than mull over a phrase for years just because it is ‘classical poetry?’ That excite my passions and sentiments into quick action and/or excitement rather than make me spend the whole month sitting in a daze trying to figure out what the meaning was? Performance poetry that tingles my senses not by the sweet voice of their performers or their movements at the podium but by the fact that I understand them the minute each flowery sentence is uttered, like an instant dose of caffeine? Hip hop chants that tell me cat throw your hands up and tell me all about the Game and we Ride in the same wave, One Blood, and I feel happy spitting staccato bursts of rhyme rather than agonise over a Mr Prufrock (or was it?) who life is measured in teaspoons or agonise over an Eliot cat?

For those who love such, I have no qualms and no quarrel. But as for me, poetry similar to rocket science can as well gather dust in my shelves, quantum physics in shortened, rhyming sentences simply gives me a headache. I confess, then, that I am lazy. For those writing un-poetic poems, (who comes up with such classifications anyway?) you have a client in me because I got the disease too. Poetic Laziness.