Hey, I guess I'm a poet too!

After reading the poems in our poetry packet that were writen by William Carlos William I am appaled. Poetry can not be simply a set of words that are randomly put together to form a written sample. I find it ridiculous that this man's "poetry" can even be considered poetry. Hey I guess I'm a poet too, (and I didn't even know it haha). To further illustrate my point I will now write a poem off the top of my head.

Computer Screen: By Paul E

Bright screen I see in front of me

I type away for my blog

It seems like fun but it is not

because I am not a poet. Who is?

Now who in their right mind would consider that poetry? That is what William Carlos Williams did when he wrote the poem The Red Wheelbarrow. This isn't poetry, these are sentence fragments! What do you think?

Comments

[Katy D.]

I think poetry is pretty much anything, an emotion/feeling or something as planned as an epic.

[natalie g]

I think you are underestimating the power a few words can have. A poet can use only a few lines and create a powerful emotion. That doesn't mean they are lazy or untalented. The lines you wrote had very little underlying meaning, whereas William Carlos Williams spent his life creating meaningful lines.

[Meghan W.]

I understand where you are coming from Paul. Poetry sometimes seem so stupid, and not important. Those sentence fragments that you typed just seem so useless. What purpose do those lines even have? Anyway, yes I am just as confused as you are.

[Paul R.]

I’m sending this comment to those who wrote about how William Carlos Williams’s poems don’t seem like real poetry, to offer my opinion.

As I think about the poems of Mr. Williams, I’m reminded of an art class I had in 8th grade. To introduce us to a new project, my teacher showed our class a video about this man who lived in a run-down neighborhood in Detroit, one that I think had been affected by race-related rioting in the 1960’s. He decided to start up a project for children in the neighborhood by taking pieces of items thrown into trash containers, and working them into pieces of art, by either arranging them as sculpture, or taking blobs of paint and making paintings.

Many people thought that this wasn’t art, because it looked so crude. Thus started a legal battle, which pitted the man against the city of Detroit, which at one point, ordered that his artwork, which sprawled across an entire house property, be torn down. The end of the video said he’s still fighting to have his artwork kept on display.

I believe that the same principle applies to William Carlos Williams poetry. Of course it may not seem like real poetry, in comparison to some of the other poems we read in class, just like the man’s art may have not seemed like art in comparison to what we might find inside the Chicago Art Institute. But it’s a poem that came out of his head, and as such, it’s a poem indeed.

On that note, I would now like to offer tribute to Mr. William Carlos Williams by writing a poem to him:

William Carlos Williams
You wrote short poems
Simply describing a subject
And called it a poem
You are a genius.

[Paul R.]

I’m sending this comment to those who wrote about how William Carlos Williams’s poems don’t seem like real poetry, to offer my opinion.

As I think about the poems of Mr. Williams, I’m reminded of an art class I had in 8th grade. To introduce us to a new project, my teacher showed our class a video about this man who lived in a run-down neighborhood in Detroit, one that I think had been affected by race-related rioting in the 1960’s. He decided to start up a project for children in the neighborhood by taking pieces of items thrown into trash containers, and working them into pieces of art, by either arranging them as sculpture, or taking blobs of paint and making paintings.

Many people thought that this wasn’t art, because it looked so crude. Thus started a legal battle, which pitted the man against the city of Detroit, which at one point, ordered that his artwork, which sprawled across an entire house property, be torn down. The end of the video said he’s still fighting to have his artwork kept on display.

I believe that the same principle applies to William Carlos Williams poetry. Of course it may not seem like real poetry, in comparison to some of the other poems we read in class, just like the man’s art may have not seemed like art in comparison to what we might find inside the Chicago Art Institute. But it’s a poem that came out of his head, and as such, it’s a poem indeed.

On that note, I would now like to offer tribute to Mr. William Carlos Williams by writing a poem to him:

William Carlos Williams
You wrote short poems
Simply describing a subject
And called it a poem
You are a genius.