For the reader who wants to like poetry

Confession

I didn't always like poetry. I hated it.

As a child, I thought poetry was dumb. I thought you had to pause at the end of each line and had to read it in a sing-song voice.

I started liking poetry because, like you and song lyrics, I liked the way the language itself sounds. I liked the way the words tasted when I said them. And it helped to realize the images and themes in poems snake from line to line. I found the more I read poetry aloud and heard poetry read by people who love it and appreciate the forms, the more my own appreciation grew.

Ways to read poetry

Some of the people who helped me love poetry were my college professors. We read poems together. We wrote poems. We read each others’ poems. We commented on what we liked about poems and what we hated. We explicated poems. (It sounds naughty, perhaps, and not to disappoint you, but it just means you take a poem apart, analyze it on various levels, and explain what it means, using lines from the poem to support your analysis.) We illustrated the imagery found in poems on with colored chalk on wall-to-wall chalkboards. We sat in the grass in the shade on sunny days and read poems. We used phony British accents when it seemed appropriate.

So my professors had a lot to do with my gaining a greater appreciation for poetry, but so did my classmates. Every month or so, we held a poetry circle, gathering to share our favorite poems or prose excerpts, often on related themes. In March, for instance, we called our evening, “March Hares and Mad-hatters” and read poems that pertained to madness. In October, we gathered around a bonfire in a sleepy hollow and read spooky stuff.

Recitations

But don't let poetry itself scare you off! One of the reasons I like Billy Collins, and why he appeals to a larger popular audience, is his approachability. His poems are just plain fun to read and he is always poking fun at poets who take themselves too seriously. One of my favorite poems is Collins’s “Litany,” which, as he explains, is a parody of a Western love poetry that compares the beloved to various objects. You can listen to Collins’ reading of the poem, but for a real treat, listen to this three year old recite the poem from memory. That kid knows what poetry is all about.

It’s about the way the words taste on your tongue.