Why don’t more people read poetry for fun? There are a few suspect contributing factors.

I think many of us began linking poetry with negative connotations in school where we are often first exposed to one type of poetry. Usually we concentrate on ancient, white, male poets who write strictly organized narrative poetry with a rhyme scheme and about fifteen stanzas. Some of these, I don’t mind. My first favorite poet was Edgar Allan Poe, who falls face first into all the above categories. But it doesn’t give much scope for new readers to find what they enjoy, especially when so much of poetry is wildly different from that. The definition of poetry is so broad that finding something to your taste seems like it should be very doable. This may be the same reason that others find poetry intimidating; there is too much to explore, too much to examine. Dedicating time to it doesn’t feel valuable when there’s too much there to focus on one thing.

The breadth of the subject is also a reason as to why there is so much disagreement over what makes good poetry. Poetry is an intersection of wildly different audiences with wildly different opinions. Often, people will only have a taste for one category, genre, or era of poetry and have little interest in other poetry with less in common with what they know they enjoy. What is considered good in one style, by one audience, might be frowned upon in other contexts, and this is exaggerated by the wide difference in these styles. This leads to plenty of disagreement over what elements make good poetry; should it be personal? Detached? Romantic? Narrative? Rhythmic? Rhyming or free verse? I’ve even noticed that there is a gap in the quality of poetry which I can only assume is colored by perception. It tends to feel as if poetry is either very good or very bad, with very little middle ground. Evaluating poetry can be difficult and it’s hard to say whether this is a tendency for people to read anything that doesn’t immediately strike them as awful as being good, or anything that doesn’t immediately strike them as great as being terrible. I think it could be a little of both, depending on the person. Because poetry typically relies on rhythm, one usually forms a subconscious and very strong opinion on the sound, the syllable counts, and the enjambment, but doesn’t have a firm grasp on why they think what they do. Poetry sometimes just “feels” right or wrong.

Having so few metrics to judge the medium on instinctively and little consensus on what to explore (not to mention, a fairly small community to even point you in any direction at all), it’s no wonder more people don’t dwell on the subject. With a little more guidance and a nudge in the right direction, more people would probably find poetry they enjoy, but right now, they don’t even know what’s out there.

On that note, discover something new (maybe) below!

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”

and on a less classical note…

There are trees and they are on fire. There are hummingbirds and they are on fire. There are graves and they are on fire and the things coming out of the graves are on fire. The house you grew up in is on fire. There is a gigantic trebuchet on fire on the edge of a crater and the crater is on fire. There is a complex system of tunnels deep underneath the surface with only one entrance and one exit and the entire system is filled with fire. There is a wooden cage we’re trapped in, too large to see, and it is on fire. There are jaguars on fire. Wolves. Spiders. Wolf-spiders on fire. If there were people. If our fathers were alive. If we had a daughter. Fire to the edges. Fire in the river beds. Fire between the mattresses of the bed you were born in. Fire in your mother’s belly. There is a little boy wearing a fire shirt holding a baby lamb. There is a little girl in a fire skirt asking if she can ride the baby lamb like a horse. There is you on top of me with thighs of fire while a hot red fog hovers in your hair. There is me on top of you wearing a fire shirt and then pulling the fire shirt over my head and tossing it like a fireball through the fog at a new kind of dinosaur. There are meteorites disintegrating in the atmosphere just a few thousand feet above us and tiny fireballs are falling down around us, pooling around us, forming a kind of fire lake which then forms a kind of fire cloud. There is this feeling I get when I am with you. There is our future house burning like a star on the hill. There is our dark flickering shadow. There is my hand on fire in your hand on fire, my body on fire above your body on fire, our tongues made of ash. We are rocks on a distant and uninhabitable planet. We have our whole life ahead of us.

Zachary Schomburg’s “The Fire Cycle”