Poetry is Not For Rushing

Trying to push-pull towards poetry again.
Worked on the novel this morning – making notes on how to structure a scene, how to take it from a broadly-themed first sentence down to a very specific set of words and actions at the end – but have spent the afternoon, or part of it, pouring over the archives at AGNI.
 
Poetry isn’t something you can skim.
I’ve tried.
I’ve tried to breeze through these marvelous, short pieces and I can’t do it. I either give them my full attention, or I miss everything.
 
Novels, you can breeze through. Especially the kind of genre fiction that I love so much. Even with rich, thick descriptions in every paragraph, even when the dialogue is full of symbolism and metaphor… you can still read a novel as a for-the-hell-of-it thing. But I try to do that with poetry, and I have to make myself stop, slow down, pay attention to every line, every word.
 
That doesn’t mean that I “get” a given poem any more than I did before. I have days – bleak days? – where I look at (capital letters) Good Poetry and see… nonsense. Write nonsense. Mix observation (exterior) with expectation, supposition, meditation (interior), throw in some aliteration, and there you have it: Poetry!
I’m still learning how to craft these pieces that can be read on more than one level.