I grew up hearing that poetry was inaccessible. My mom would read a poem and say ruefully that it was beautiful but she didn’t understand it. As children are wont to, I adopted her stance on the issue until I had become old enough to decide for myself. But after immersing myself in the works of such diverse poets as Shakespeare, Milton, Yeats, Rilke, and Oliver, I discovered that I could understand poetry, and what’s more, I could write it.
Many people shy away from poetry with the idea that it is too obscure, that the imagery is so thick that it is impossible to wade through. While it is true that some poetry is easier felt that read (T.S. Eliot, you beautiful man, I’m looking at you), there are as many types of poetry as there are people. The comic reader may enjoy Ogden Nash’s absurd works, and the mystic will appreciate John Donne while the realist will definitely feel a kinship with Charles Bukowski.
Poetry, in its deepest sense, is just a way to express an image, a feeling, or a story using the sparsest and barest words possible strung together in a way that sounds beautiful. However, the only way to accomplish this is to find the best word for each situation. While this can be difficult, it is a skill that every writer should have, whether he be journalist, memoirist or novelist. In fact, I would say that every college student should have this skill, as we are all writers, whether we like it or not.
Poetry doesn’t have to be complicated. There are rhyme schemes and meters that have been followed since the beginning of poetry itself, but free verse is an incredibly versatile and absolutely viable form of the genre. As long as the words are in lines and have a sort of music to them, they are considered poetry. The prose poem, which is simply a few lines of prose which have a good bit of imagery to them, is barely distinguishable from very short fiction, but it is still considered poetry.
I don’t think that everyone should be a poet, though writing down your feelings in ways that may only make sense to you can be an incredibly cathartic experience. However, I firmly believe that poetry is truly an accessible genre. Even if you don’t understand what the author is trying to convey, in reading the poem you should get a sense of the music of the phrase, the simple beauty of the written word. Poetry makes you slow down and look at things more closely than you normally would. It forces you to parse out every word and try to guess why the author used “this” instead of “the.” It encourages you to use a different area of your brain than you would when reading prose. And in the end, the important thing to remember about poetry is that it may not have an immediate agenda; the words themselves are the important things. As W.H. Auden says “A poem should not mean/But be.”[1]
[1] Auden, W. H. "Ars Poetica." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 01 May 2016.
