I was told once, by a Teaching Assistant in one of my classes, "If you're going to try to use allegory, you should know how to do it properly." If there was only one specific lesson I remember in college, that was it...But it's sort of how I feel about metaphor. Which, is yet again hypocritical because I love to use metaphors in speech, and I tend to make them up as I go - and that doesn't always result in an effective metaphor.
The point being, I have this frustration: having studied poetry often in school, people who write modern poetry seem to think that throwing a bunch of words in a blender then splattering the results on a page is good. Granted, I learned some "methods" that can make for really interesting results, and even have names, but the Kool-Aid didn't get me. Call me a snob, but it just doesn't bring the same effect. I find myself so often stumbling over my peers' work because, for as much as one could dig through the work of Wordsworth, Lord Byron or Matthew Arnold (whom I consider true poets because they thoughtfully and emotionally crafted their works) and find likely the meaning they intended, it can be a struggle to just plain make sense out of the modern style.
I've had my hand at writing it, and my fun, too, but that doesn't mean I fully support it.
In my senior year of college, I had the joy of taking a handful of poetry classes, as well as being the poetry genre editor for the U's literary magazine, Ivory Tower, for which I read through over two hundred poems. I came to see that the modern style is a mash-up of strange theories, practices, and band-wagoning butt-kissing - for lack of more fitting words. We would read something and there might be little commentary on what it might've meant (probably because no one knew), and then a discussion of something slightly relevant and highly political would arise. In comparison to the beginning of my college career's lit classes in which we studied the classics; lyricists and romantics, where we would have real discussions of a poem's meaning and it would sometimes take up the whole class period.
Maybe it's just my nature and therefore personal opinion, though I don't claim the sentiments here to be by any means or fashion an implied end-all-be-all analysis of the modern style (or perhaps it's post-modern, I never cared for all that...except the post-structuralists, I dug some of those theories). Rather, I think it's worth noting that not everyone buys into that, and if that is this generation of poetry, it might lose credibility and validity. There will be far too many people in twenty, - fifty years reading our writing going, what the hell is this even about? And I suppose poetry can be quite intimate; a way to express yourself not to explain your feelings to others, but if it is that, let it stay in your diary. It should not be so esoteric and nonsensical that not a soul will ever know what it means more than each word's definition in a dictionary!
I think of some of my favorite poems, and they're not only well-crafted and interesting to read, but they tell a story. And to me, modern poetry is like the awkward kid at the party who says something no one understands, though it's in English and we all just move on and pretend it didn't happen. In some ways I wish the literary community would do that; push past the common, superficial consuming-desire to be effortlessly and innovatively brilliant at the expense of actual depth.
I know I can't even live up to these; my own standards, but I think it's worth mentioning, nonetheless. It's worth breaking the cycle of mindlessly agreeing that all the pure nonsense out there is great, or even good poetry.
-For a modern poetry take on modern poetry, see: Commentary on the Modern
