Introduction

My name is Gabriel Friesen. I'm a sixteen year-old living in Southern California. Poetry is something I haven't always loved, but I've liked it ever since my mother told me to read John Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean? (which I highly recommend) and have been devoted to it ever since I read John Keats' On the Eve of St. Agnus.
So what's the point of this blog? It is to feel the pulse of poetry, to show the tenderness of language that good poetry expresses, that poets express to the reader; to advocate the art of reading poetry. The latter comment might sound wierd, and I admit that it borders hyperbole, but it deserves the emphasis I give it. Too often do people fall to the temptation to write "poetry" and never read it. To say something to the world, with lots of emotion (I guess), but without any craft about it at all. This false motivation is deteriorating the art form.
My favorite way of expressing this is by quoting Ciardi: "A poet must have a sense of the whole language stirring,"–in other words, must feel the pulse. Poetry is expressing the most tender feeling; not the most blatant message. Connotative rather than denotative. Take notice of bad poetry through history; most of it either pushes morals, is preposterous, or hopelessly unconvincing, but most of all, lacks sensitivity of language.
The paradox of it all is that in order to understand this, someone has to convey the message. Oh well.