Poetry, I must admit, isn't really my bag. I've always thought of poetry - proper, dense, artsy poetry, not fun poetry like that of Max Boyce and Dr. Seuss - as a lazy middle ground for people who are neither talented enough to write songs nor inspired enough to write proper stories. Poets don't have to adhere to any rhyme scheme, meter, or musical structure, and where prose is generally expected to make some sort of sense, poetry is often appluaded for cloaking its meanings (where they actually exist) behind several layers of imagery and symbolism and nonsense.
So that's my opinion on poetry. It's a pretty shit opinion, and not one I'm particularly proud of, but the rest of this blog post won't make much sense without it.
I recently purchased Easter, Patti Smith's 1978 breakthrough album, on the back of a glowing recommendation from +Audio Antihero. Patti Smith, of course, is a poet, and much of Easter is made up of the dense, artsy poetry to which I was referring earlier. Here, for example, is Babelogue, a spoken-word rant that's accompanied only by the cheering, clapping, and general chatter of an enthusiastic crowd:
