I make regular trips to barnes and noble to sip on a chai latte from the starbucks across the street and read books i can't afford. The library's too much of a hassle, i'm so disorganized i always end up with such an insane fine i would have been better off to just buy the thing. Anyways, i had been away from barnes and noble for a decent amount of time (probably a month and half). I almost always end up in their pathetically small poetry section to read some hardy or cohen, but when i returned this week they had rearranged the store and the poetry section was no where to be found. When i asked an employee all they could say was, "i'm sure there's one somewhere in here, but i don't really know where". So, after much searching i settled for an annotation of Greatful Dead lyrics in the some section about musical artists or something, i forget what it's called. But this got me thinking, the poet is seriously underappreciated in modern culture. Poetry is minimalized in text books, and negated from works of art to representations of cultural movements; civil rights, romanticism, ect. But students are not taught to enjoy reading and examining poetry. I do not mean to say that poetry is better than prose, only that it should recieve equal attention. One of my favorite quotes is "anyone can take a simple thing and complicate it, but true creativity is simplifying the complicated" or something around those lines, sadly i don't know who it originated with. That is the essense of good poetry. Good poetry takes a novel's worth of emotion and plot and sheds it down to the bare bones and with precise word choice and the manipulation of rhyme and rhythym creates an equally moving piece in just a few stanzas. If we want to raise creative children who think for themselves, we should seriously consider teaching poetry as something more than a convenient record of the racism of the 60's and 70's. That's just my two cents.