The question Ben brought up today has forced me to think of poetry as someone who does not want to understand what poetry is, and that is when I realized that if a poem can invoke a question then the poem has fulfilled all requirements. As students of poetry there is a responsibility to study poems and research them putting the tools to work, and the questions that come out of that work creates conversation. We wont like every poem that lands before us but that does not mean the conversations will be any less thought provoking/ emotional.
There is good and bad poetry, but that does not makes the poems permanently bad or good. The poem invokes... can we talk about a poem as a trope is this allowed? The poem invokes emotion and as we were discussing on Tuesday with Arctic Scale not every emotions needs to be good for it to be good. Our emotions change about a poem as it lingers within our colored soul. I think this works with Nightingale because of how much academia is such a large aspect in the poetic world. There becomes a need for a higherarchy to grade poems and Nightingale works against that while simultaneously commanding the respect of the academic world because craftsmanship which is something that we all respect and value.
I like to think that we return to poems with a fresh look and give it another chance like sour patch kids or any 1980s slasher film because we love and hate but sometimes we forget the cause.
This is all my thoughts and as they are I stand by them like a bird in the wind.
I think maybe there are different definitions of "good" poetry. Right now I'm sort of imagining them as a Venn diagram where "academically interesting" and "emotionally moving" can overlap, if you can visualize that. Often in classes where we study poems as literature, I feel like a lot of focus is placed on the former rather than the latter, which I suppose makes sense. Emotions are really subjective, of course, and it's hard to talk in the abstract about how a poem makes you Feel versus concretely talking about the mechanics or scholarly references within it. I think these categories can definitely overlap, but sometimes if a poem really moves me--say, Sexton's "The Truth the Dead Know" and its line "It is June. I am tired of being brave."--I have trouble discussing it objectively as an academically interesting poem. That's totally me, though, and I'm sure other people have different opinions! I'd definitely be interested in Dr. Porter's view of this, since she both studies poems and leads classes in discussion of them.
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