They put up poems on the Oslo subway trains. I don’t know that much about poetry, even less about the poets of today, but it seems like the poems they put up are of relatively young and unkown poets. Anyway, I was heading home from work today when one of those posters caught my eye, and I started to read. It was in Norwegian, and I don’t rememember it exactly, so I can’t put it up here. The thing was, I read it over and over again, doing my best to understand it. No matter how hard I tried, I just didn’t get it. It didn’t make any sense. 

I have read poems by well known writers that I did understand. So was it just me being slow, or was the message in this poem rather weak. I assume there was a message in there. Obviously the message must have been weaker than other poems I have read, and of course it may be that I miss some important reference. 

I find this hard with most images as well, to understand them I mean. The vast majority of fine art photographs don’t tell me much beyond the obvious, but unlike the poem, I usually conclude that there is no underlying message. It’s just a reflex. I think it has to do with the massiv amount of meaningless photographs I see everyday. It makes it so easy to assume that a photograph is just that. But I don’t see a poem that often. Usually I have to go look for them, so when I see one on a poster on the subway, I automatically assume that it is there for a purpose. That someone brighter than me thought it to be good. So if I don’t get it, the fault is on me. The fact that it is a poem is such a strong indicator in it self. If I see a photograph, I usually assume that some advertising agency put it there to make me buy something, and that just hit my in-brain spam filter. Due to all this noise, you really have to convince the viewer that it is worth spending time looking for something subtle or hidden in a photograph, and if you don’t have a well known name, you must communicate with big letters. At least part of the message must be in big letters, just as a teaser.