Do Wannabe Poets Have to Sit With a Thesaurus??

Got an orkut mail from a young Gujju dude who has published 3 poetry books (collections of poetry?). They are listed on Amazon. Pretty cool, huh. As always, envy (I'd love to have a few books by me listed on Amazon), and curiosity (what does he have that I don't have [except the obvious]?) drove me to take a look at his poetry.

The result?

I am fed up of the crap that passes as poetry these days. Okay, I'm no poet. The poems that I try to write occasionally, just end up being too depressing (except for two of them), and that's no fun at all. So, I do have the utmost respect for those who do write poetry – haiku, sonnets, ballads, whatever.

But somehow, I think the whole idea of poetry seems to be lost. Most often it is just tons of decasyllabic words forcibly strung together. This particular poet I think just sat with a thesaurus and emptied it out to make poems. I'm sure that if we took a look at his thesaurus, there would be hundreds of pages that were blank. (The idea of a thesaurus that loses a word each time you take a word from it. Sounds quite magical!)

To get back to the point: Does poetry always have to appear so pseudo-intellectual? Why does it have to be so difficult to understand? What's the difference between poetry and songs? Songs are not at all difficult to follow. Yet they touch our hearts. And when you get down to the basics, poetry is a song too; it just isn't set to music.

Even good old Shakespeare mostly used mite-sized words, as did most of the greatest poets of both past and present.

Who can forget Mr. Frost's haunting lines?
And the woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

If you noticed, only "promises" is trisyllabic and "before" is bisyllabic. So for four lines, with the exception of these two words, Robert Frost used only monosyllables. Need I say more?