April is National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry month.  Unless you are a child who does a poetry unit this time of year or are involved in poetry or love poetry you likely possess little interest in this matter.

I love poetry.
But honestly, I also do NOT love poetry.

There is so much poetry out there that makes NO sense to me.   I do this thing when I go to the library where  I pick 20 or so books of poetry off the shelf and then I read through them like a magazine: flipping from one poem to another.  In my stack of 20 books I usually only end up with 2 that I find compelling.  That means that 10 percent of all the books of poetry that I look at that I find interesting, relevant, or even comprehensible.  I am certainly not purchasing or re-reading that much.

So to de-mystify poetry let me tell you  things I don't like about poetry:

When it is too long.
 I can read a max of 6 stanzas of poetry before I am done.  Short and sweet.

When I can't track the cultural symbols and complexity of metaphor.

     Sometimes  I actually like literary devices. I often use a lot of metaphor in my writing and thinking. I am a symbolic thinker, as such it's not hard for me to catch on to levels of depth communicated.  EXCEPT when writing is not from my reference point I just simply cannot understand.  I often just can't get into the images enough to know what a writer is writing about.

I don't think this is bad thing at all. I want poets of all different cultural locations to write. I just recognize that I am not always the intended audience. Also, I think that as a white American I often have my cultural as the dominate one.  Poetry has given me a chance to imagine what it is like to encounter another community's art and not get it.  2. Expand my own imagination. 3. Revealed my ignorance.

When poetry uses a lot of abstraction

This isn't really different than the other one except that for a person who likes poetry  I clearly prefer poetry that has a frankness.  Midwestern poets are my jam: Ted Kooser, Kathleen Norris, Robert Krapf (among many others).  There are, of course, poets who have frank voice, who are NOT midwestern.  Anyway, I sometimes need a poem to be about a "cup of coffee" and not about "a cup of coffee that symbolizes man's desperate need to seek pleasure from the consumption of goods and a sexual desire..."  Just say what you mean.

When poetry is trying to hard.




 Okay, so with that out of the way what do I like about poetry.

When I was in Graduate School, dying of sadness. Or rather, wishing that I was dying of sadness and being surprised every morning that my heart was still beating.  I picked up a book of poetry by Stanley Kunitz. I had never heard of him, but the book was like 1.98 and something in it grabbed me.  I took that book home and nearly swallowed it whole.  Then somehow, by some strange twist of fate, I found a book of poetry by Ted Kooser.  That book swallowed me whole.  In both of their work I heard a voice that was validating of ordinary life.  They taught me that my sadness could be poetry. My walk to class in the snow could be poetry.  My daily discovery of rubber bands all over the streets of Cambridge could be poetry... and that poetry could be beautiful.

So so so many things saved my life that year.  Poetry was one of them.


I like poetry because it can be funny.
Serious.
Hard.
Beautiful.
Gross.


And maybe what i like most about it is that something in poetry feels unfinished.  It is like washing a dish.  There are always more dishes to wash. More poems to read.  But for this moment this one thing is done...