I worry about poems. People want to love them, and our digital, “5-minute read” age might seem ideally suited to play matchmaker. But as poets know, poems aren’t like data or opinions, which are hard to love for other reasons. Poems are more like people. They require time, effort and attention. Lip-service love isn’t enough. Poems like babies may be small, but they make up for it in other ways.
So how do we, poets, help people get what they want when it comes to poetry, and help poems in the process—so we can stop worrying about them?
One possibility is to address common misperceptions.
Poems have a funny reputation. On the one hand, because of nursery rhymes and their presence in so much children’s literature, people think of poems as approachable, spontaneous, child’s play.
On the other hand, because they seem to belong to the same family as hymns and sermons, and therefore to be associated with matters of the spirit, people think of poems as uplifting. When they are overwhelmed by love or loss, even folks who never normally give poetry a second thought turn to poems for comfort or company.
On the other hand, actually sitting down and Reading A PoemTM sounds like work: wading through stilted, archaic, labyrinthine or just plain bewildering phrases while doing a puzzle without knowing the rules—Doesn’t it have to rhyme?—or if it even has a solution.
On the other other hand, there’s something about poetry…
Maybe the allure has to do with the elusive. Poetry is famously impossible to pin down, though certainly not for lack of trying.* Here’s just a small, eclectic selection of attempts from a small, eclectic handful of poets:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The best words in the best order.
Leo Tolstoy: Everything with the exception of business documents and school books.
Marianne Moore: Imaginary gardens with real toads.
Wallace Stevens: A revelation of words by means of the words.
Emily Dickinson: [What] makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me.
Matthew Arnold: A criticism of life.
Ezra Pound: About as much a ‘criticism of life’ as a red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.
For me, being a poet means I’m constantly bumping into metaphors, knocking over non-sequiturs and looking under and behind words for the experiences they are valiantly attempting, though often as not failing, to contain. So you’ll forgive me when I tell you that all this reminds me of one of my very first trips to the beach.
I was about six, standing by myself just behind the line where the froth of the surf keeps irresistibly melting into the sand. The wind was pounding in my ears, my hair flying every which way, my skin coated in a not altogether unpleasant film of salt and grit. I was watching a boat like an eye on the horizon with some idea that it held the answer to where exactly the far edge of the water met the near edge of the sky when I suddenly found myself on my ass, scrabbling to hold onto ropes of sand that kept tugging me toward the water and disintegrating between my fingers. It was scary and messy and embarrassing—and I kind of hoped it would happen again.
That September, on the first day of first grade, Miss Rimer (yes) sat me next to Alan Wonder (seriously), and it was just like that moment at the beach.
Ever since, if I’m completely exhilarated and spinning out of control, flustered, preoccupied and weirdly serene, walking into lampposts and forgetting to eat, it can only mean one thing. I’m in love.
Or reading a really great poem.
To me, they’re two roads to the same happy calamity, metaphors for each other. Once I’d gotten a taste of that feeling of being knocked clear over by some poem—or some one—I wanted more. And that’s why, even if the poem I’m reading isn’t a love poem, it’s always about love.
So when my non-poet friends tell me they can’t remember the last time they enjoyed reading a poem, I tell them to take one out for a coffee, or a trip to the beach, and instead of trying to figure it out and pin it down, try just getting to know it—and letting it get to know them—and see what happens next.
There’s no guarantee you’ll fall in love with poetry, I tell them, and there’s no guarantee you won’t.
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* Samuel Johnson, famous for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), cautioned against it: “To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer.” It probably came as no surprise to him that he was spitting in the wind. Under his definition of the word definition: 3. [In logick.] The explication of the essence of a thing by its kind and difference. “What is man? Not a reasonable animal merely; for that is not an adequate and distinguishing definition.” Bentley.
Liane Strauss is the author of four books of poetry and writes the monthly Substack How To Read a Poem: A Love Story. Her most recent collection, The Flaws in the Story, was chosen by Mary Jo Bang as the winner of the 2023 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.