Hello, Beautiful People!
We’re talking about a theme from a sort-of science fiction movie, and so here’s a sci-fi haiku (sci-ku?)
everyone is late
for start of time traveler’s
convention but me
Beauty Doesn’t Require You to Understand
People confess their deepest poetry feelings to me. It’s not something I ever anticipated or intended when I started writing and publishing poetry. But it happens—and I’m always happy to listen.
The confession I hear the most is a little heartbreaking. Someone will tell me, with a dreadful weight of shame, “I don’t understand poetry.”
This is usually their opening, and then they will tell me they don’t like or read poetry because they never could understand it in high school or college or whenever.
This is heartbreaking because poetry is one of the great pleasures of being human. It’s heartbreaking because they were probably the victim of educational malpractice somewhere along the line.
Imagine if we talked about flowers the way we sometimes talk about poetry:
I don’t understand flowers. I used to love them, but now I can never tell the stamens and pistils apart.
Flowers all look the same to me.
My sister is a botanist, she loves flowers and grows them all year long. I don’t even know where to begin with a flower.
That’s a little unhinged, right? You don’t need to be a botanist to enjoy the look and fragrance of a flower. You don’t have to know a thing about flowers to love them.
Beauty doesn’t require you to understand.
Beauty is something you feel and treasure, something that seeps into your soul.
There is nothing wrong with reading or hearing a poem and enjoying the rhythm of the language, even if you have no idea what it’s about. You can love a poem just for the plain language of the lines, you do not need to look for a theme or hidden metaphor.
A poem does not have to be a puzzle, it can just be a flower.
If you love to wrestle with language, then you can also see a poem as a puzzle and derive great satisfaction from breaking it down.
But a poem, like a flower, has value as a thing of beauty, regardless of how deep or shallow your literary knowledge is.
There’s a scene towards the end of Wes Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City, where a character gets a little meta:
I still don’t understand the play
It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.
With art of all kinds, that’s the whole ballgame. If you don’t understand an abstract painting or a poem, or a movie, it doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story.
Beauty exists outside of meaning. The more time you spend with art and other things of beauty, the more comfortable you will get with not understanding. The more you are willing to endure that state of ignorance, the more meaning you will discover, and the more beauty you will find in the world around you.
I hope you will have the courage to fall in love with uncertainty.
Be the poetry you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
Thank you, Jason; reading this post of yours was extra special for me personally and I loved it. Have just upgraded to paid status--it was time. Thanks for writing and sharing and drawing what you do--I love your haikus.✅🙏
Well said!