I am a poet myself, at least I call myself a poet, so why do I find so much poetry difficult to read. I have just down-loaded "Ariel" by Sylvia Plath onto my kindle(Kobo actually, I must be accurate about such things) and have been battling through it for the last hour or so. I don't deny that some of the lines speak to me. Some are upsetting; cause shock or even pain. Some are quite beautiful in their lyrical quality, but, on the whole, the meaning behind them eludes me. Surely this ought not be so. You would think that knowledge of the process of producing a poem would make it easier to tease out the meaning of a piece of verse. Of course it is true that I have never actually learnt to study poetry, or if I have, it was at school and so long ago that I have forgotten all about it. To the truly literary, no doubt, the meaning of Plath's lines is perfectly clear. It is rather bruising to my ego to find that to me many of her poems are quite obscure and that I have no idea what they are about at all.
A friend once told me that she likes to find something mysterious in a poem, that she enjoys puzzling out hidden meanings. I understand what she means, but I am afraid that what I write is somewhat shallow. There are no interesting hidden depths.When I write, what you see is what you get. That is why I was surprised to hear that my publisher has been asked for permission to include one of my poems in a school textbook. Of course I was pleased and flattered, but rather puzzled. What could they possibly want to do with it? -- analyse it? You might as well analyse a recipe for spaghetti.
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