Picture this: you are walking down the sidewalk. In the distance, you see a group of people dressed in all black. As you approach them, you can see they are all wearing matching red berets. A cloud of cigarette smoke is swirling above them. As you continue to walk closer to them, you hear rhythmic snapping. Why would they be snapping? You wonder. Then it dawns on you. Poets.
End scene.
If this is your perception of what poets are like, then throw out that image. I have noticed that my generation has never taken a significant interest in poetry, albeit any sort of author or form of writing. Unfortunately, poetry, or writing in general, seems to be one of those things that one must have a preconceived interest in order to pick up a poetry book or novel. The only person you can discuss your favorite poem with is your fellow English major student. Even if literature or poetry does not pertain to any aspect of your life, such as what you are studying, poetry still can be of interest to you as a form of art and writing.
The vitalization of your imagination is one reason why you should be reading poetry. Unlike a novel, poetry has a lot of (metaphoric) space in between the lines. The poet had to leave out a lot of words to get his or her point across in the poem ergo, you sometimes have a lot left to interpret on your own. While poets can have clear intent on the meaning of their poems, you can make it your own and decide what you want to gather from reading poetry, just like any form of art.
I like to think of poetry as abstract art. I would bet that if you have ever taken a trip to an art museum, you have once stood in front of a huge canvas with mere shapes, lines and textures and had no idea what to think of it. But, after a whole lot of staring, the art piece made you think of something specific. A weird feeling bubbled up in you and you realized that mystifying canvas made you feel emotion. Perhaps it was an array of black, textured lines and you felt anger or sadness. The artist could have intended for those emotions to come across in his or her piece, but left it up to you to bring those feelings to life because there is no clear explanation of the art piece.
Hard as it may be to realize, poetry really makes you think. Perhaps some of us just see poetry as a short piece of writing with every other line ending in a rhyme, because that was how it was introduced to us in elementary school, and we never thought to explore the realm of poetry further because it seems juvenile and far too invested in emotion. But if you look up the greats—the Beat generation, the modernists or the political activists—you can see that poetry serves a much different purpose. No one can conquer language like poets because they express significant ideas in such few words—fewer words than any astrophysicist, engineer or rocket scientist will ever use.
