LIFE
The Day I Learned Poetry
It takes a lot of loathing to get the fire started
As a freshman, I had to learn poetry before prose. They were fashioned as two separate subjects in a span of a year. I had a wonderful lecturer from Cambridge who taught me poetry. She was very much into the stanzas, metaphors, alliterations and onomatopoeia. Sadly, I wasn’t.
I dreaded the subject. On gray days and thunderstorms, I hated it. I was looking forward to the next semester so I could move on to Short Stories. That’s where the action is, I thought. What action? Lord knows. It definitely was not poetry. It felt like a dentist visit.
My assignments averaged between B to B+ and quite frankly, it was good enough for me considering it felt like I was drinking caster oil for constipation. But my lecturer was not having any of it. She pulled me to the side one day after another average assignment and asked me what my problem was with poetry.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth fearing she might take it personally and think it’s her and not poetry as a genre. She wasn’t exactly a plucky young hen. I was told that being old she was rather sensitive. It took Herculean strength to zip my mouth from confessing I felt she was another self-indulgent colonialist who took pride in the Queen’s language…
