I hate poetry. I hate how compact it is.

I like long, never-ending sentences that examine the fractions of each one of its words, those that make pauses, challenge the reader with parentheses, and always say too much to assimilate.

I want my readings to open new search windows in my brain for the thousand commas and em dashes they provide me. Then, I want to close them all and repeat the process. 

I want to feel like the writer’s thought process was none, and they did not outline a creative piece. Every word came from intuition, and every pause was to sporadically add fresh information. 

I see too much thought as a limitation to the sentence’s variety of words. And if a mistake in judgment is to be committed on the text, I prefer for it to be addressed in a later sentence or paragraph instead of edited out. 

There is also the limitation of the self when the instinct is taught to be renegaded and the norm, which the writer is reminded of through thought, is accepted.

I like Virginia Woolf; she wrote a lot before the period.

I used to be frustrated when, in middle school, a teacher asked for an eight-sentence response to an essay question. I would write a well-detailed answer in two or three chunky ones.

The grade outcome was not the greatest because the instructions were bent, but the content was still more complete than my peers’ work. I could not work through five more sentences when there was nothing else to write about.

Especially when it comes to a question regarding a niche subject in a test, the answer can involve a load of synthesized information that, for me, should only be presented together.

And there is a familiarity and pathological appeal in breaking sentences in the middle like the latter one. It shows I stopped and added because that is how my mind flows, in small breaks. I should not have to come back and say, “For me, especially when it comes…”

That closeness in the structure choice also reminds the reader of the text’s genre, an opinion, before stating a claim. If it was too far from it, they might have already forgotten, and such a claim might have provoked furious reactions.

But it only happened because that is how I process the now-written thought before the millisecond it takes for my fingers to touch a letter on the keyboard, and I did not think about the “for me” before I wrote the “say.”

It is wonderfully personal.

Not only is the structure personal, but the information, which is gathered by people and presented in so many ways until a textbook can translate the wandering and gathering of knowledge into serious teaching material so that whoever learns it can turn it into their own wandering and gathering of a sentence.

I hate poems because they, in general, gather too much and wonder too little. There is limited space for the vast explanation of meaning. However, they are, too, deeply personal, but for the reader, who interprets through their own meaning.

When I write, I want the audience to know my meaning and to abuse metalinguistics for them to know the why of every single word and every single pause. Therefore, I hate most poems.

I do know this is a rather compact text, which might cancel the validity of my claims to the reader, but I do rant as much as it is permitted inside the allowed creativity in the structure of a newspaper opinion piece. 

Writing news articles is an interesting activity when one is a ranter. I feel the need to overshare because every detail is important, and I am constantly haunted by the “How many words can I put together before punctuation is required?” question with every new piece. 

I did, however, start liking poems better when I realized I could read them as a single non-stopping sentence. 

Even that we can bend. Deal with it, poets.