How to Love Poetry
By: Zach J. Payne
Tags: Writing, Learning, Poetry, Education, Art

Okay. So you haven’t seen a poem in the wild since your days in high school. So, since the 80s.

70s? 60s? Well, it’s been a long time, anyway. And you don’t remember much about it. Just that it was highfalughtin, hard to understand, and, in some cases, looked like little more than a jumble of random words spread artfully across the page.

Or maybe you read Shakespeare, and, while you technically recognized that the words were some archaic form of English — and even modern English — you had no idea of what he was trying to say.

So, it was easy enough to write off poetry. It was a soft skill, and not exactly something that you needed to get through your day-to-day life. A sonnet’s not going to help you change a tire. A limerick won’t shut your boss up. A haiku won’t stop your kids from crying.

But, now, it’s time to come back to the fold. And, despite any reservations you may have, I promise: poetry is a lot easier, a lot less complicated, a lot less weird than your teachers made it seem.

Here are some steps to getting started.

Forget everything you’ve already learned.

Okay, maybe not everything. You definitely want to remember how to breathe. All of that important stuff. But when it comes to poetry, you can safely forget a lot about what your teachers taught you.

The first thing is, interacting with poetry on a daily basis isn’t about analysis. And this isn’t your teacher’s fault. They’re supposed to teach you analysis; but it’s just about impossible to teach you enjoyment.

Unless you want to start writing poetry, you don’t have to sit down with a poem and pick it apart. You don’t need to crack open a giant textbook on color theory to figure out why the poet made the curtains purple. You don’t need to read Le Langage des Fleurs to discover the symbolic meaning of a daisy.

(For the curious: the sun, innocence, purity, true love, chastity, transformation, and the goddess Freya. But I digress.)

Poetry is not a puzzle that you need to solve. You don’t sit down with your morning cup of coffee and go, Oh, there’s the 3,5 Dicaffeoylquinic Acid. And there’s the Acetylmethylcarbinol!

No, you just drink the coffee. So too with a poem.

Start with your favorite songs.

A song, when you strip away the music, leaves behind a poem.

Okay, maybe this isn’t quite as mind-blowing for you as it was for me, back when I started my freshman year of high school.

It was relatively early in my freshman year when Mrs. Davies sat us down, and put up the lyrics to Taylor the Latte Boy on the overhead projector. First, she walked us through it as a poem. And, it was only once we looked at it, read it through, and analyzed the story of the poem that she picked up her boombox.

And that, friends, was the day I was introduced to one Ms. Kristin Chenoweth. A formative moment, in retrospect.

But you don’t have to start with show tunes. Take any song with lyrics, and read it out loud. Don’t read it in the music’s rhythm, just read it like you would anything that wasn’t a song. Get a feel for the musicality that’s inherit in the words; the rhythm, the rhyme, the feel.

Move on to modern poems.

Classic poetry is great. But it’s an acquired taste. You’ve got to work up to it.

Start with something new, something modern. Let’s define that as 1960s and onward. Start with Maya Angelou. Or Maggie Smith. Or the Button Poetry and Ours Poetica YouTube channels. There will also be plenty of examples here in the Ninja Writer Pub.

Anything older than that, and you start getting into some weird conventions with poetry — they tend to force the syntax and even speak in ways that we don’t. Language usage evolves over time, so it’s ideal to start with language that you’re familiar with.

And then, once you’re ready, you can go back to the fun stuff, like this ancient verse, which inspired a young J.R.R. Tolkien:

Eala earendel, engla beorhtast,

ofer middangeard monnum sended. Hail shining-ray, brightest of angels,

sent over middle earth to all mankind.

— Cynewulf, Christ I. fl. 9th century CE.

Read it out loud. Or, at least, listen to it.

This is where people start to argue with me. Okay, I get that you want me to read poetry, but read it out loud? People are going to think that I’m weird.

First of all, people already think you’re weird. Second, I’m not telling you to go recite Beowulf at the Port Authority during rush hour. Obviously, I have no objection to you doing that, but that’s not what I’m asking.

Just sit down, and read the words out loud. You don’t have to put on a dramatic performance or anything like that. But there’s something special when you put your mouth through the process of reading out loud.

You’re not using just one sense — sight — to experience the words, but you’re using your ears, the feel of your mouth and body to shape the words. It slows you down. It gives you a chance to savor the words, to experience them, instead of simply glancing through.

In some cases, like the YouTube channels I mentioned above, you can listen to other people read poems out loud. It’s not as great as you reading them out loud yourself, but it has much the same effect of slowing things down, of internalizing the poem through multiple sensory pathways.

Learn the difference between poetry and other kinds of writing.

Usually, language is all about communicating information, or telling a story. It’s our primary way of doing both of those things. Don’t touch the stove. This is what happened during the war. Chrissie slapped Savannah across the face.

It follows, logically. It agrees to at least the vast majority of the rules that we’ve established for the English language.

And it’s not just that poets can sometimes throw in some nonsense words, a la Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, where the meaning gets deconstructed, it’s that poetry offers poets a canvas to play with words outside the boundary of language, for the sheer joy, misery, and chutzpah of it.

Sure, most poems are going to follow, with a little bit of work. But sometimes you’re going to come across something that reads, at first, like complete and total nonsense.

Don’t worry! That’s allowed. Think of it like poetic cubism, playing around with shapes and colors that don’t really look like anything until you sit with them. Or even poetic abstraction, where it’s just a few splotches of paint across a urinal.

We’re used to language, broadly, having to make sense. In poetry, it doesn’t really have to.

Try writing some for yourself.

You don’t have to share it with anybody. You can burn it when you’re done. (Safely, in accordance with local laws.)But if you’re curious about poetry, an easy way to learn is to jump right in.

Of course, you’re not going to be great at it. At least, not at first. You’re going to wonder if it’s even poetry at all. But it’s something to play around with. A way to explore your relationship with language, to push the boundaries of what’s possible, to say something in a new and unexpected way.

Who knows? You may even end up in a textbook some day.