Why I Hate Poetry

It's the middle of April, and that means we're deep into National Poetry Month.

Welcome!

Every day is National Reading Day at my house, so I love a publicly sanctioned opportunity to welcome the masses into my world. And yay for a month dedicated to poetry. Beautiful, sublime, uplifting poetry!

Ugh, poetry.


My shelves are filled with prose. Fantasy, scifi, erotica, thriller, biography, self-help, history, ad nauseum. 

Ironically, I also read a lot of Shakespeare. Bill and I go way back. I played Nick Bottom in a giant paper mache donkey head in A Midsummer Night's Dream in 8th grade and fell in love with iambic pentameter (and the saucy antics of Elizabethan theatre).

But show me a volume of Whitman or Browning or Burns and while I may pretend to be totally into it for my image, in my head I'm just pondering ways to change the subject lest my true feelings suddenly reveal themselves.

It all goes back to English class.

I never really got poetry in school. Not in the way the teachers proclaimed we all should. Throughout the readings and dissections and discussions I always felt like my brain was tripping over itself when trying to digest the meanings of all those little chunks of words.

Me, the star English student, the kid who read for fun. The nerd who aced every essay and who actually enjoyed the Victorian literature we were forced to read.


I held it against poetry for making me feel dumb and I have given it the silent treatment ever since.

In the same way that endlessly analyzing Picasso and Renoir takes some of the awe out of the experience, so too does marking up the couplets and quatrains in a sonnet strip away some of the magic from the whole.

And that's not how poetry is supposed to be. Poetry is supposed to give you feelings. It's supposed to be an experience, not a lesson. You're supposed to let it wash over you while you absorb it, learning through osmosis about truth and beauty (and sex, if you're my old friend Bill).

But I don't want to hate poetry any more. I don't like that I don't like it, that I let it beat me and never fought back. I have avoided it for too long. I can't even imagine what I've been missing out on.

So, for #NationalPoetryMonth, I have challenged myself: to pick up some poems by some of the greats -- ee cummings and Robert Frost and Maya Angelou -- and read them. Just read them. Don't try to pick out layers of meaning or search for symbolism.

Just read.

Absorb the words.

Live the experience.

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