Poetry is For Everyone

Learn to Love Poetry Again

You don’t need a fancy background or special degree to enjoy the experience of reading and writing poetry.

Reading an article this morning written by Caia Payne about poetry emphasized some points that my writing group was just informally talking about. There’s only one real poet in the group (not me), and then I also write poetry sometimes when the mood strikes me.

I think a lot of people who don’t write poetry would like to but they feel intimidated. There are some very accomplished writers in my writing group, several of whom write literary fiction, and so some of the comments and questions surprised me.

The most common question was what kind of education, training, background etc. we had that made it possible for us to write poetry. Not only do neither of us have degrees in poetry, our degrees aren’t in anything that is even writing related.

They asked who we’d worked with them, since someone had to have trained us if we wrote poetry that actually got published in literary journals. Again, we both answered that we hadn’t trained with anyone.

The conversation turned to how most of those in the group didn’t even read poetry because they just didn’t have the education to understand it. This made me sad. I understood their point though.

I remember all through school dreading poetry units. I knew the poems would be impossible to understand and I’d have to figure out things like allusions, imagery, symbolism, alliteration, themes and motifs, rhyme schemes, rhythm and meter among other things.

I was always a big picture kind of girl. I enjoyed letting a poem flow over me and getting whatever I did out of it without ripping it apart. I didn’t want to worry about what the poet meant by “tree,” or “peach” or “footsteps.” Unless I had a clear indication otherwise, a tree was something that normally grew outside with branches, peach was a fruit or a color and footsteps were what you heard when someone was walking nearby.

I was always able to get something from the poem, no matter how complex it was. It may not have been what the poet intended, in most cases it probably wasn’t, but my position was if they wanted everyone to get exactly the same thing from their work they would have written it in clearly expressed prose.

Unfortunately, none of my teachers ever agreed with me about this and so, like the rest of my peers, I was stuck, taking apart each phrase and looking at each individual word and diagramming things like you did when first learning how to write sentences. I couldn’t help but doubt that was the way the poet had written the poem.

The message that was always communicated was that a poem’s meaning could only be found by accepting that the words were symbols which did nott mean what they said but stood for something else, It’s not that I didn’t believe this was ever the case. It just seemed limiting to set up absolute rules about what poetry had to be and how it had to be perceived.

My biggest problem with the way poetry was taught though had to do with it having primarily one meaning with imagery and symbolism indicating things that were agreed upon by critics which had been accepted for years if not decades.

It’s felt like the story of Ariadne who gave Theseus a ball of red thread which he unraveled as he navigated the minotaurs labyrinth so he could find his way out again. This made sense because a maze has one way through with other paths leading to false turns.

To me, poetry always felt like something fluid and subjective. It could have any number of paths through it depending on who was reading it. Yes, of course the poet meant to accomplish something through their words, impart a theme, evoke emotions. But choosing a poetic format to do this suggested to me that wanted people to bring something of themselves to the poem.

When I began to write poetry, I very much felt this way. I tried to communicate something with my poetry, but when this was the form I chose to write in, it meant that I didn’t want to just lead a reader from point A to point B. I wanted them to find the way through that made sense to them.

I think the great thing about poetry is that because it doesn’t attempt to say something as succinctly, simply, and directly as possible, it can touch a large number of people but do so in different ways. Well written poetry is often projective, like a Rorschach test. What you see and feel is based on the inner workings of who you are. In my opinion, if a poem says something to you, whatever it may be, then the poet was successful. They have evoked a reaction, created an experience, got you think about something differently, made you feel something.

So, don’t be afraid to read poetry. Whatever you get out of it makes it worthwhile and you don’t need to have any specific background to gain something meaningful. Like anything, there will be poems you like and those you don’t, and that’s fine too, even if you can’t necessarily say why all the time. I don’t have an art history degree and can’t tell give you a lecture about paintings. I just know what I like and what I don’t, whether it’s a Cezanne or was painted by a local neighborhood artist.

Definitely don’t be afraid to write poetry. It’s a great means of expression and it is freeing in there being no real rules or requirements for free verse. If you prefer more structure, there are a myriad of poetic forms that you can learn how to create from articles online.

I challenge you, especially those of you who may have shied away because you felt intimidated, to pick up a book of poetry or search for poetry on online and to spend an hour or two reading through it. Then see what kind of poem you can create. It doesn’t have to be great and you don’t ever have to let anyone see it. Do it if for no other reason than to know you can.

Thanks to Caia Payne, Noemie V.A., Caitlin Johnstone and Jenny Justice.

Natalie C. Frank has had poetry featured in several anthologies including Beast and Brews and Untimely Frost.

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