Well...sometimes. The poetry I like must be short, simple, and without underlying mysteries.
I am not a person who likes to labor when I read something. Of course, I violate my personal preference with Robert Frost. But then again thinking about Frost's The Road Not Taken or Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening isn't work at all. It's a tantalizing memory trip filled with pleasantries or regrets as we chose.
A beautiful poem the teacher made us memorize in the Sixth grade is Trees by Joyce Kilmer. I wasn't alive when Kilmer composed his classic, but classics live a long time and occasionally I still run the poem's words through my mind.
This one isn't a poem but a song composed by a Russian guy named Israel Isidore Beilin. It's called God Bless America, another one drilled into my developing brain by a school teacher. Funny how the sounds of youth can make us goose pimply. This one sung by Kate Smith will do that to me.
With me, liking isn't about analyzing something and saying, "Ah, I like this because the iambs are so perfect." My personal sense of liking is just a gut feeling, a sort of almost-instantaneous pleasant experience which causes me to say, "Hey, I like that," without further deconstruction.
The way I view life, poetry is kind of like music. Sounds touch our soul. Words well expressed can have the same effect. Like this:
I've got the bottle-blond blues
blue as I can be
That bottle-blond babe's
gonna be the death of me.
Now, that's what I call poetic.
Just kidding.
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