Ronald McFarland

Ronald “Ron” McFarland is professor emeritus of English at the University of Idaho, where he taught for 47 years. He served as the state’s first Writer-in-Residence, a two-year position (1985-86) then involving 10 readings a year all over the state. He credits his year as editor of the Brevard Junior College (Cocoa, FL) newspaper for compelling him to write. He has 30 or so books of various sorts (poems, prose, fiction, nonfiction) to his credit. He played soccer on the UI club team for 23 years, has been an avid bird hunter & angler. He lives in Moscow, Idaho and is currently working on a collection of poems. 

On Disliking Poetry
A Prose Poem

Some of our relatives and good friends do not like poetry. We still like them, though perhaps a little less than we did before we learned of their disesteem for poems. 

Some of them may buy copies of our books, but we suspect they don’t read them. They think we’re too enamored of language, too picky about verbs and nouns, too dismissive of adjectives, too inclined to torque the nuances of meaning with metaphors, too precious when it comes to subtleties of sound, though we don’t often rhyme. 

Our friend Larry enjoys stories and novels, but he doesn’t like poems, though he says he’s tried. When Georgia one evening on our patio read one of her poems to him, he said “it’s too long.”  But we still like him. Kind of. 

After all, didn’t some notable poet write about poetry, “I too dislike it”? Then she wrote, “there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.” And she claimed to feel “a perfect contempt for it.” Some of our friends and relatives would applaud. But we still kind of like them. 

Later, that poet, Marianne Moore, wrote admiringly that she found in poems “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Some of our friends would object and argue, “Why doesn’t she just say what she means?” We’d be inclined to sigh, maybe shake our heads, but we’d still like them. 

After all, William Carlos Williams wrote, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” We like that.