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I Don’t Like Poetry

Copyright John F McMullen 2020

I have a friend who has told me
I don’t like poetry
he even repeated it at a Writers Group
to which we both belong

I actually felt the same way for 35 years
and I was a published columnist and
had been an English major in college
— and look at me now (obsessed)

I hadn’t even read a poem in that time
but an unplanned encounter with a
Charles Bukowki book of poetry
captured me and held me prisoner
until I had written my first poem
and that one begat more and more

Now this friend, in addition to being
a writer is a reader but I don’t think
he would ever say I don’t like books
just because he found some novelists
not of his liking; he would just find
another author that he might enjoy

Sadly, I was the same way but
luckily, I found that
        Charles Bukowski
        William Wordsworth
        Langston Hughes
        Seamus Heaney
        William Shakespeare
        Sylvia Plath
        Daniel Berrigan
        H.D.
        Robert Burns
and  T.S. Eliot
are as different from each other
as
        Stephen King
        William Faulkner
        Jack Kerouac
        Upton Sinclair
        Herman Melville
        DH Lawrence
        Harriet Beecher Stowe
        Mickey Spillane
        Earnest Hemingway
and  James Patterson
are from each other

Then, perhaps, if he looks around,
he will find, as I did, one poet or
even a few hundred that he will like
Who knows?

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