Today’s title is a quote from Gwendolyn Brooks. April is National Poetry Month in the United States. For many people, poetry has a reputation for being fussy, elitist, and difficult for the average person to understand. Perhaps turned off by assigned reading of western culture classics during high school and college, folks often fall away from poetry after graduation. When was the last time you read a poem that was new to you or explored the work of an unfamiliar poet?
The American Academy of Poets has a list of 30 ways to celebrate National Poetry Month. Many of the suggestions are easy to do, like subscribing to a Poem-a-Day podcast or email list or reading 2022 most-read poem by a contemporary poet, “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye. The more adventurous might try writing a poem and sharing poems with friends or at the start of daily meetings.
Poetry in Popular Culture
For all that poetry can seem relegated to the classroom, it’s everywhere in American culture. Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Shakespeare, and William Blake routinely pop up in characters’ dialog. The line “Tyger, tyger burning bright” from William Blake’s “The Tyger” was a key catchphrase on the show The Mentalist.
Presidents Kennedy, Clinton (twice), Obama (twice), and Biden have all featured poets reading their work as part of the Inauguration ceremony. Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” and Dylan is far from the only songwriter whose lyrics bend to poetry. The intricacy of rap, in particular, depends on clever wordplay and the rhythm of language that rivals anything by Lord Byron.
No less a popular show than Breaking Bad used Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” a sonnet about power, hubris, corruption, and the effects of time on reputation, as the only words in a trailer teasing the final episodes of the entire series (2013). Read by lead series actor Bryan Cranston, backed by a low percussive beat, and showing images of the series’ setting in the New Mexico desert, the poem is hauntingly modern, despite having been written in 1818 about the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses II.
The movie Dead Poets Society (1989) celebrates the transformative power of poetry and Kate’s poem in English class remains one of the most famous parts of Ten Things I Hate About You (1999) 25 years after the movie’s release. Mad Men’s leading man quotes Frank O’Hara. You might know William Carlos Williams’ poem “This is Just to Say” better as the one about plums in the icebox. The poem’s simple form and syntax make it easy to riff on, resulting in not one, but two waves of going viral on social media.
Limericks are even a weekly feature of the NPR comedy news show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. The resident announcer reads a limerick aloud, and the random caller has to fill in the missing last word or phrase. Because of the familiar rhyme scheme (and a few hints from host Peter Sagal), the callers almost always guess the correct answers.
Poetry Can be Tricky, but the Effort is Worthwhile
I’ll be the first to admit that some poetry IS hard. Epics like Beowulf are sweeping in their action and somewhat elliptical in their imagery, even when translated into modern English. John-Clark Levin’s translation of Beowulf into Gen Z lingo for McSweeney’s might be just as confounding as Seamus Heaney’s lyrical update, despite the current language. It’s hilarious, though. The opening lines, “Fam. The Spear-Danes in, like, pre-Boomer days / And the kings who ruled them served courage and greatness, straight facts. / We have heard of these princes’ GOAT campaigns” make me giggle uncontrollably.
The language barrier of Old English and even Middle English (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) adds an additional layer to the perception that good poetry must be difficult. Even the language of Shakespeare, while technically early modern English, often sounds strange and old-timey to contemporary listeners.
On the other hand, poetry written in the 20th century isn’t necessarily easier to understand. Why is the evening “spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” and why are the women talking of Michelanglo in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? Each word in Maya Angelou’s “The Lesson” is simple but her meaning turns on a contradiction:
The years
And cold defeat live deep in
Lines along my face.
They dull my eyes, yet
I keep on dying,
Because I love to live. (ll 8-13)
For me, the investment of your imagination and curiosity is what makes poetry worth the effort to understand. If the poem has words connected to the human senses, can you see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the scene? Are any of the words unfamiliar or do they stand out for other reasons? Is the poem describing an experience or feeling that you’ve likewise shared? Finding some detail you can hook onto is an entirely valid way to start unpacking a “difficult” poem.
My friend Ed Doyle-Gillespie came to my writing class this week to talk about his most recent poetry collection, Father of the Red Grotto Used Book Store. The students all wanted him to discuss what particular poems are “really” about, to let them in on the “hidden meanings.” He gently held them off for most of the class, only sharing his thoughts while drafting the collection at the end of class. Ed was far more interested in what each student got from the poem than in declaring one true meaning.
I think that might be the source of many people’s hesitation about poetry. They’re not sure if they’re reading it correctly, as if each poem can only have one narrow interpretation. But that’s not how it is. Poetry is enjoyable because it sounds lovely, or because it reminds you of something, or because it shows you new perspectives, sometimes all in the same work. Poetry is enjoyable because you like it, for whatever reason you like it.
My favorite tip for understanding poetry is to read it out loud. Pause briefly for a comma and a bit longer for a period; keep going at the end of a line if there’s no punctuation. Because rhythm and sound are essential elements of poetry, you can often pick up far more from hearing it than from just reading it silently in your head. After all, if it works for getting a sense of a piece of prose that you’re working on, it works for poetry, too.
How About You?
We had Robert Frost’s “The Master Speed” read as part of our wedding ceremony and one of my proudest parenting moments was when our daughter was in third grade and picked Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven to read aloud in class. She was ten.
Do you have a favorite poet or poem? Can you dash off a haiku or a sonnet? Do you feel drawn to certain types or periods of poetry? I study British Romanticism for my scholarly discipline, but I like poetry from everywhere.
Tell us about it in the comments.
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Kellie