This is not a Why poetry sucks or poetry is something writers do when they can't write node.
A conversation in which I told someone that I didn't like poetry brought to my attention the fact that the poetry that I dislike so much is not in fact all poetry as I believed, but instead was the type of poetry here within the confines of E2.
In my mind, the space taken up by poetry can be much better filled with more information about whatever the writer is trying to convey, rather than the flowery phrases, pretty words that are mostly redundant.
This is partially because of my belief that the feeling, emotion and message behind the words are more important than the words themselves. Surely this sours my opinion of the pieces that I am describing, but I do not think that the opinion is unique to myself, nor that it is unwarranted.
To the people here, it seems that poetry to them is attempting to take the simplest concepts, or the most common concepts and then expand them, fill them with ambiguities, adjectives and fluff until they have at least tripled the necessary length of their writing.This is definitely not the case for all the poetry here, and lots of pieces deal with highly complex and emotionally charged issues, and I respect that, but even in these cases the writers seemed plagued with the same need to overly expand their ideas.
At a certain point, description and imagery stop being beautiful and graceful and instead become nothing more than the reader's attempt at showing off the extent of their vocabulary. While there is nothing particularly wrong with doing that, when doing so starts to overshadow the meaning of the written piece, the it becomes detrimental and as I stated above, the beauty stops.
And that would have to be the biggest problem that I have with the poetry here.
The meaning and the beauty that is in the writer's mind as they write the piece loses the focus, and beyond that, there is no more enjoyment in reading the piece than there is in reading a slab of a dictionary or thesaurus.