Why should we care?

From an early age, we're told that poetry is beautiful. Does that make us like it? It certainly makes us believe that we should like poetry because we like beautiful things. I spent some time hating on poetry instead. This was until I realized that everything we find beautiful is poetry. A beautiful song is poetry. Beautifully written prose is poetry. Poetry is technique and through the clever use of technique, poets draw us in. But why should we care to be drawn in? I hated poetry because I believed that anything that requires a tremendous amount of effort to comprehend is not worth my time and patience. Why force understanding upon ourselves? Good poetry is that which forces us to feel rather than understand. This is what the element of shock does to us. Shocking poems are great.

Shocking/good poems are belligerent and their poets are even more belligerent. They intrude into our calm, collected lives and pester us. They place images before our eyes that we may not necessarily want to see. They make us hear sounds which may annoy us. Poets suck us into their minds without our consent. We become confused, angry, bewildered, and most importantly, shocked.

Shocking poems are what we need to concern ourselves with as critics. But why in the world should we want to read 80 lines of poetry in which we find Sylvia Plath whining and bitching about her father? When I first read "Daddy," I thought, "Great, here's another self-pitying brat talking about loss and sadness and a dissatisfying childhood." Then, I heard Plath's reading of her poem with all the bitterness in her voice and I began to care. I cared enough to spend two days picking her poem apart--perhaps to try and comprehend where Sylvia Plath got the audacity to write something so outrageous and more importantly, to understand how and why "Daddy" riles us up like it does.

The thing about Sylvia Plath's poem is that it screams at us for no apparent reason. Plath is repetitive without being redundant. Her poem is yelling obscenities and so, after we hear her poem, we bash her, label her a whiner, and call her ignorant for likening the genocide of millions to her own individual suffering. But Sylvia Plath has gotten to us. She has made enough of a statement to get people riled up. Clearly, she wanted to shock her readers and shocked we readers are. We are shocked when she says she felt like a Jew even though she wasn't a Jew. We are shocked when she calls her daddy a Nazi and a bastard even though he was not a Nazi. Moreso, we are shocked that she refers to her dad as "daddy" in spite of depicting him as a Nazi. Sylvia Plath gets to us and sucks us into her own twisted mind.

As readers, we simultaneously love and hate the feeling of being unsettled and displaced from our comfort zones. Good poetry is able to do this to us. To interlope into our lives, bring us out into the open and carry us to a great height. We have a fear of heights but at the same time, a love for the feeling of freedom that great heights instill within us. Sylvia Plath's poem does this to us and though we may call her whiner, she is a creative, smart, and effective whiner. It's poetry! She can say whatever she wants and so she does, loudly. She forces us to believe her and we do because we can see all the ugly images and hear all the disconcerting sounds in her poem. Then, we find out she's not a Jew and these images are only in her head. Then, we become angry, but Sylvia Plath has already gotten to us. She has made us believe her suffering and she has made us care about her suffering because we care about good writers. We are intrigued by them because their poetry has the power to provoke our anger and our praise--by displaying either emotion, we've demonstrated the poem's ability to force us to care.