I Thought You Hated Poetry (03/14/16)

HAPPY PI DAY, EVERYONE!
I want to head over to McDonalds and buy one of their pies... The McDonalds' pies are more rectangular and individual sized, so no pi in that pie. :)

On a more related note, raise of hands, who here doesn't like poetry, or at least didn't like poetry when you were in school? How many of you just don't like writing it? How many flat out hate it altogether?

Okay, I respect that. I know I'm not the best poet, so I see where the frustration comes in. But for those of you who completely hate poetry, let me ask you this: How far would you go to define poetry?

After all, poetry doesn't have to rhyme. It doesn't need punctuation or capitalization, especially if you are e e cummings, and the rhythm isn't always key. It isn't always short, but it often is, and there seems to be a theme for most poems.

But what crosses the line? Would this be a poem?
Blue
you.
Sad
Dad.

Or this?
Oops.
There was a door there.

And what about rap? It's set to music but it doesn't really deal with pitch and other musical elements. It is an art form, but is it more like slam poetry than music? (Apologies to all you rap fans out there- I don't mean to be harsh about your music choice. I just want to make my point.)

Do you ever see an acronym or an initialism (like an acronym except you don't pronounce it as a word) and compare it to an acrostic poem? It's almost the inverse of an acrostic, though- you start with statements and make a word out of them instead of writing descriptive phrases for each letter in a word. Are the FBI and NASA secretly poems? Deep space missions and top secret investigations sound much more exciting than you would think a poem would ever offer, yet you can't deny the similarities.

What do you think? Are poems just distant cousins of these similar ideas? Or have you found a new reason to love poetry?