Why People Think They Don't Like Poetry...
Almost everyone who says they don't like poetry is lying. Not deliberately. But if you ask them to explain what they mean, the story almost always goes the same way — a classroom, a poem, a wrong answer, and a decision made around the age of fifteen that poetry was not for them.
Poetry is not a puzzle. It does not have a single correct meaning waiting to be unlocked by sufficiently rigorous analysis. It is an experience — a compressed, precise, carefully constructed experience of language doing something that ordinary prose cannot do. You don't solve a poem. You feel it. And then, if you want to, you think about why you felt it. But the feeling comes first. Always the feeling first.
When we strip the feeling out and go straight to the analysis, we are not teaching poetry. We are teaching the corpse of poetry. And then we wonder why students leave the classroom convinced they don't like it.
You are not someone who doesn't like poetry. You are someone who hasn't found the right poem yet. Go find it. It is looking for you too.
Rupi Kaur has sold over twelve million books. Amanda Gorman read a poem at a presidential inauguration and the internet stopped for a moment, genuinely arrested, and then spent three days talking about it. These are not people who don't like poetry. These are people who like poetry enormously — they just don't call it that, because the word has been so thoroughly associated with difficulty and the classroom experience of failure that it no longer feels like it applies to something that moves you.
Poetry is the most direct form of language we have for the things that resist language. Grief. Love. The feeling of a particular afternoon in late autumn. The specific quality of missing someone. The things that sit in the body without words until a poem comes along and names them and you feel — with a physical jolt sometimes — the relief of being understood by something written before you were born by someone who never knew you would exist.
This is not a luxury. This is not an elective. It is available to everyone. It always has been.
Where to Begin
Night Sky with Exit Wounds — Ocean Vuong
Devotions — Mary Oliver
The Carrying — Ada Limón
Good Bones — Maggie Smith
Milk and Honey — Rupi Kaur
Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke