"I don't understand poetry. It just doesn't make sense," my friend tells me. I sit beside him silently, letting his words pierce my skin like daggers. I want to scream, "You're wrong. Oh, you are so wrong."
I can't blame him, though. There was a time in my life when I thought poetry didn't make sense. It wasn't until I took a creative writing class on poetry during my second year of college that I began to understand it.
My professor for the class told us to view poetry in a way that differed from what I been told by teachers and professors in the past. Before, I had always heard, "Dig for the meaning. Dig deep! Dig deeper!"
For the poetry class, however, my professor said, "Don't dig deep for the meaning. Let a poem hit you at face value." Honestly, that's the best advice I've ever been given on how to understand the meaning of a poem.
Based on the advice from my professor, I was able to realize something important: poetry is more self-explanatory than it initially seems.
You shouldn't have to dig deep for the meaning of a poem. The deeper you dig, the further away you get from the actual meaning. You'll come up with some extravagant idea that deviates from the original meaning. Don't dig so deep that you bury yourself in a hole you can't get out of.
A poem starts with the title. The title essentially describes the rest of the poem, so the content always ties back to the title. When you piece together the title of a poem with the content of a poem, the meaning becomes apparent. Don't believe me? Let's look at an example.
One poem that illustrates this idea clearly is "The Problem with Describing Night" by Bernadette Geyer. The title claims there's a problem with describing night. What's the problem? Well, the poem goes on to list different sets of phenomena that are associated with the night: stars, monsters, the moon. In an excerpt from the poem Geyer says, "If I said cloud and penumbra, Orion / And Scorpio. If I said boogeyman-" (3-4). The point? There is no single way to describe the night.
Poets aren't trying to trick you. They use language to describe something in a way most people wouldn't. My poetry professor once said to my class, "I want us to write beautifully about simple things." That is what poets do.
If you think poetry doesn't make sense, try reading a poem on a surface level. You may not understand a poem the first time you read it, and that's okay. My professor said that even if something doesn't seem to make sense to us, our brains will still try to make sense of it and add some kind of meaning to it.
Poetry is full of metaphors. It is meant to sound beautiful, to be beautiful. You don't have to dig deep to find the meaning of a poem. The meaning lies right in front of your eyes.