I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head)
Mad Girl's Love Song, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
I'll be frank: I hate poetry.
I always have. I don't feel like my sentiments will change anytime soon. I'm much more swayed by prose; the depth, the plots, the beauty of character. I feel like all you ever get in poetry is snippets of half baked characters from the written oven. It's even more horrible when poetry is crammed down your throat every day in a class. All the hidden meanings and made up B.S. just bothers me. Maybe the poet just wanted to add the detail in without it being of any significant meaning? Or maybe I am just a really untalented poetic mind.
Searching through the given poems for this weeks assignment, I stumbled upon Plath's "Made Girl's Love Song" and the moment Mrs. Solano always talked about, when the poetry "speaks to you," it actually happened. Although we were assigned to write a formal response cuffed with a personal response, in any academic ground, you're never actually able to really speak on behalf of your thoughts: they're never quite eloquent enough, or even worse, they are probably wrong.
One of my many faults as a still learning youngin' is the fact that in my mind of endless imagination, I take the basic character of the people around me, and I spend immense amounts of time compiling the information around me from books and my own crazy thoughts to turn them into something they really aren't. In my mind, I can turn an obnoxious, egotistical, class clown into an attentive man who needs someone to listen to him and to really get to know him. Of course, he really is what he appears at face value, but I make the mistakes to put the idea of him into something grander, something worth a story, a book, a movie. Which can really be painful. especially when I attach myself to the idea of a person I've made inside of my head, and when I slowly 'fall in love' (God I hate that phrase, can someone in the world come up with a new way to say such an annoying, trite sentiment) with that image in my head, it never really ends well.
And maybe that's what else really captured my about the poem. The devastation of the speaker. The feeling of anger towards the person who caused it, but the inward guilt of that I really was the one who caused it all in the first place. Maybe if I could have just not attached myself, not expected things to go another way, maybe not have even thought the thoughts that caused to much damage, things would have been better. Which is basically how I live my life, even outside of the romantic. I feel as though I regret to much and never make decisions that ever really please me. Maybe it's because I'm still young and the output of the input hasn't been shipped out yet. But just the regret and the guilt of so many things. It's difficult. I need to get over it. I need to get over a lot of things. I mean, there are still things from seventh grade and even elementary school that can get me shaken up if I really think back to them. Why did I do that, Why did I have to make a fool of myself, Why didn't I do that, blah blah blah.
Our instructor in marching band has always had interesting things to say about life. Today, as motivation for marching band, we need to be more pumped up (not necessarily for marching band) for life. Just to wake up and enjoy being alive, and the stupid little things like a new album coming out and listening to it in the car. Maybe I should just get over the fact that people leave and that I build up my expectations of people to much. I should just get over it all and wake up and feel excited to be alive and for another day to have a busy schedule filled with people I could probably like if I actually put more effort into liking them, but that's another blog.
But I still hate poetry.
