Poetry

I find poetry strange, fun to write, enigmatic, and boring to read or listen to. Is it possible that poets just endure other poets writing for the sake of wanting the same approval when it's there turn to read? Or am I the only writer of poetry who thinks other people's poetry is mostly boring? It is interesting in one regard. It's nice to compare my own poetry to others'. Maybe this is why poets read poetry, to see their own progression. Actually when I approach poetry with this attitude, I start to enjoy reading it. I like the unending amount of styles there are out there. I like that the good poetry vs. bad poetry debate cannot ever be objective as long as free verse is allowed to flourish, (as it should be). I like having discussions about what makes a poem "good".
Still this interest in the art of poetry seems to actually be an interest not in poetry but in debate and discussion and subjectivity. I used to write self-reflective poetry, essentially emo poetry. This kind of poetry is hit or miss, depending on how good the poet is on hitting universal emotions, using personal emotions. This is a skill. An emo poem sucks if it tries to pretend that it's deep. Depth may be extrapolated by the listener or reader given his "different" experience of life, but emo poetry is content with hyperbole and tongue and cheek. And that's okay. But emo poets should stay away from writing volumes. It will eventually start to wear on you. Eventually this is what happened to me. My own emotions wore on me. My poetry became less and less an expression and more and more a form of therapy, and/or self-mutilation. Poetry has a way of being therapeutic, but it should not be used for therapy. It's art, it is therefore a self-expression on one hand, but on the other hand it's universally meaningful, full of complicated interpretations, and uninintentional expressions of the artist's soul, with the possibility that there may be an expression of just one soul. A side effect may be therapy. But to use it for therapeutic reasons is just sad, and that's all it is and nothing more. (In my humble opinion).
So I shifted my style of writing. I started writing observational poetry. I would try to pick out things that I observed every day and give them meaning. By this I mean, that I would write either about the things that we see every day and take for granted or I would write about common observations that we might not take for granted and put a new twist on them. Eventually this started massaging my ego, making me feel smart, more than impacting people. Again it was therapy.
So then I decided, that listening poets have this ability to make anything deep, especially things that they didn't write, and especially if they assume that you are smart or educated, which most people assume about me, I assume. (We just are constantly making asses out of each other aren't we?) And upon this decision, I decided that aesthetics, not influence was what was important. For people can only be influenced if they themselves want to be, and they can be influenced by anything. In light of this, poetry is not magical. So since I now believed that philosophic depth was subjective I could turn my efforts to the tickling of the ear. I would write phrases with apparently educated meanings, full of wordplay, alliteration, rhythm, but entirely void of any real meaning. Of course, just like sweet basslines make musical substance obsolete in our day and age, so will a poetry of aesthetics for its art. And both to the complete ignorance of even the more astute listeners. And so this was fun for a while, but eventually the lack of depth, left me with a longing.
So I have come to believe, that the raw emotional angle towards poetry is deficient, because it risks leaving the listener with the writer's dirty laundry and nothing to do with it. I see that philosophical/observational poetry is contrived and arrogant, though it may be done with skill, it's unauthentic, and therefore meaningless. I see that purely aesthetic is shallow, fun, but shallow. Shallowness isn't always bad, but always shallow is never good.
This is what I believe today. A good poem is one that's end is not to preach, although a preachy poem may be good. It's end is not to please the ears, although it may be pleasing to the ears. It's end is not to be witty, although it may be clever. It's end is not be a combination of any of these ends. A poet doesn't have a goal. A poem will not accomplish what it's supposed to do if the writer has a goal in mind. But neither will it accomplish it's goal by being a sort of abstract mess of words. In order for the poem to be good it has to be authentic, creative, meaningful, inspiring, thoughtful, aesthetically pleasing, it must come from the hand of a writer who has all of these things in mind, without holding any of them as an end. It's why poetry is a skill. Like any skill, it can only be truly learned by experience, and truly critiqued by discussion, and debate. I am willing to say that a poem is good, or that a poem sucks. But I also could be wrong.