Poetry is for you!

Were you born as a baby? Are you made of mostly organic material and plan to eventually die? Do you ever have thoughts or feelings? 

If you answered yes to any of those questions, congratulations! You’re perfect for poetry. Poetry loves you deeply, wildly, patient as god, waiting through the wind and rain with an iron resolve until you open the door. 

This much I know: 1) The human condition is absurd and tragic. 2) People love beauty and they love to feel seen. 

Poetry represents an opportunity to reach for each other through space-time, and toward the big ideas that lend us context and peace. Poetry is a tap on the sublime, a doorway to the quantum. 

This world is your birthright as much as it was Homer's and Keats’ and Dickinson’s. You have an equal stake in the magnificent, the devastating, and the profound. You don’t need to rank among the mammoths to engage with your own nature, with the nature of things. 

Poetry is like all the arts. (I, being crazy in love, would say the arts are all poetry, but let’s stay focused.) You have undoubtedly been systemically alienated from the arena by some bad apples who like to jerk off. While uncool - while potentially classist - that is not poetry’s fault. 

No one is ever better than you just because they have something you don’t have. Including a diploma and including, um, superior talent or drive. No pedestals! There are only humans, born as babies, on different vectors based on their circumstances, experiences, and choices. 

It’s important to realize this fact of life when you approach poetry, given its pretty brutal reputation for being intimidating, pretentious, or unnecessarily obscure. 

Two things are true. You don’t have to read bad poetry, for one. If it’s really true that a particular poem is written to be dense for density’s sake, to talk at its own head, written truly for the writer’s self-indulgent pleasure… you just don’t have to read that. Like I said, there certainly exist some bad apples who like to jerk off. It happens. As educator Andrew Bashford puts it, it's “no fun” to feel “outside the inside joke.” 

However - and no one wants to hear this one - sometimes, the poem was not actually talking over your head. Sometimes, you just gave up too easily and stopped pushing too soon. You are, in fact, on the hook to engage with things that challenge you occasionally. That doesn’t have to mean poetry, though I hope sometimes it might. 

In this age of information, please: take on a bullish faith in your ability to learn what you want to know. There is no word too big for Elmo anymore. 

Let’s stop robbing our own house! Appreciating & making art is for us Regular Job mortals, too. 

P.S. The cover image is a joke about how the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. (Paul Simon, The Sound of Silence, anyone?)