On Getting Back into Poetry After a Regular Absence

I love reading poetry, but I don’t understand how it works. For a writer, that’s an intimidating proposition, and so every few years I will decide to tackle poetry on a regular basis again. It’s sort of like when you try to take up a healthy flossing habit after a visit to the dentist’s office.

Poetry was the first form of writing I tried to reproduce. In middle school, in the early days of the internet, I made a bunch of mostly female friends on a site called Razzberry, which was sort of like a teenage poetry forum. We spent most of our time sharing appreciation for Billy Corgan’s lyrics, exhorting each other to buy Jewel’s poetry book (A Night Without Armor, anyone?) and taking crude stabs at our own histrionic, formless poems.

My Grandma Maurine was the one who encouraged my writing habit when I was a kid. She was a brilliant woman who, by all accounts, was stuck in the wrong era, a schoolteacher who longed to do so much more. Her father was a published poet, Jack Bess, and when I was young she gave me an old, tattered copy of his book of poems—Gleanings. She told me “poetry is in your blood.”

Yet, for all this, poetry intimidates me. Poems intimidate me. There are very few books that can do that. I read Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses—okay, no problem. Tolstoy doesn’t scare me, nor does Bolaño, nor Proust. Narrative is something I’ve studied relentlessly, and even when I find my focus slipping and my mind wandering—wait, who was this character again? How did they suddenly get to Italy? Did I miss something?—I have about thirty years of experience that gives me the confidence that, with enough focus, I can get something from this story.

Poetry moves me and I don’t know why, nor how to reproduce its effect. In art school (art school!), there was a major, light-hearted split between the fiction writers and the poets. The writers wondered how the poets could sit around all day, endlessly rearranging and experimenting with the same line of four words. The poets wondered how the writers could be so formulaic and careless with language. (At least, such was my impression.)

Poetry surprises me. I can run through a long poem, understanding nothing, and then, at the end, be drawn into a world that is shockingly vivid and tangible. Sylvia Legris’s poem in the Summer 2022 Paris Review did nothing for me, gave me nothing, until the last solitary line:

Wings of metal and night.

Wings of metal and night! So simple and unexpected. I’m not even sure what it conjures in my mind, and yet there is something there, something that tastes like licking tinfoil, that sharp, iron taste, the cool black breeze—here I go, trying to use more words to describe the image when the original five did it much better. That’s the mystery of poetry.

I understand this sort of confession—is that was this is? a confession?—probably sounds pretty lame to a poet. I’m sure people who steep their lives in poetry have as much of a confidence approaching it as I do with fat maximalist postmodernism (or, even more tricky, those deceptively slim little volumes that contain galaxies).

I’ll try to read poetry once again. Maybe if I keep at it, one day I’ll understand it. For now, it’s enough to be bewildered and delighted.