My favorite poem is a short one by Mary Oliver titled Praying. It goes like this:

It doesn’t have to be the blue Iris

it could be weeds 

in a vacant lot,

or a few small stones;

just pay attention, then patch

a few words together

and don’t try to make them elaborate.

This isn’t a contest but the doorway 

into thanks, and a silence

in which another voice may speak.

You may have felt it while reading Mary Oliver’s poem, the chills, the connection to something deeper. It comes as no surprise to most that our brains enjoy poetry in the same way that they enjoy music, through the rhythm and patterns of the language. Cody Delistraty writes in his analysis of our brain’s reactions to poetry that “the starkest and most primal of poetic pleasures comes not from lengthy analyses, but from the immediacy of reading or listening — the connection of metaphor, the turn of rhythm, the way the words first strike the ear. Even Vladimir Nabokov wrote that one should read not with his heart or brain but with his body, awaiting “the telltale tingle between the shoulder blades”(Delinstraty).

Yet, when asked if he reads poetry in his free time, Finnian Schaner responds with a resounding “Heck no.” This is something I hear a lot from my high school peers and the phenomenon is not unique to our school or even age group. According to a report published by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2017, only 12 percent of US Adults had read poetry in the past year. There are a few different theories out there that explain (at least partially) why most people don’t read poetry in their free time. The first is that in our digital age of social media the amount of people reading for pleasure, in general, is lower every year. These statistics and my knowledge of my peers made me wonder why poetry remains the far less popular brother to music. 

My hope with this article is to expose you to a range of poems that I or others enjoy, as well as reasons you might be convinced to pick up poetry, and perhaps by the end of reading this article, you will have been exposed to a poem or two that really resonates with you.

Despite our potentially declining literacy rate, the statistics from the National Endowment for the Arts seem hopeful when put into perspective. 12% of Americans reading poetry in their free time is nearly double the 6.7% their 2012 survey period found. The pandemic has also caused people to seek out poetry more than usual. NPR reports that “Overall visits from readers to the website poets.org went up thirty percent during the pandemic. And on the Poetry Foundation’s website, Maya Angelou’s famous poem “Still I Rise” alone received roughly thirty percent more visits in 2020 than in 2019”(Verma).

Still I Rise

Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

I personally felt that the pandemic increased my desire to consume poetry. Last year I began having trouble sleeping and in an insomniac haze one night sometime in April I stumbled across this article about Oregon poet laureate Kim Stafford’s pandemic poetry. School was closed indefinitely, the world had no idea what the future held in terms of COVID-19, and George Floyd’s death had just begun nationwide protests about systemic racism. I read “Worry: by Kim Stafford and connected with it so strongly because I felt it so simply articulated all the feelings the country was struggling to contain. 

Worry

Kim Stafford

I should put it on my resume —

I’ve made it my profession.

Let me tell you how many

ways things can go wrong.

Every dream I cherish I

break down in short order.

Give me a night, I’ll wrestle

any vision to surrender. I’m

where ideas come to die.

I’m worried that’s why

my friends don’t call.

The second theory about our low poetry consumption is that people tend to be exposed to very little poetry, and thus perceive poetry as something that is not accessible to them. When I asked James Eastman, one of the English teachers at the Mendocino High School, why his view of poetry had recently shifted positively, he theorized that “I think what’s happened for me is two things, but one is I’ve just been exposed to so much poetry at this point in my life without really even wanting to be and there are so many poems that I love, so I think it’s just an exposure problem. You’re just not exposed to as much poetry as you are to music and if people were, they would probably have a more favorable opinion of it earlier on in their lives.” The issue here is that we are generally not exposed to much poetry at all, and so we do not experience poems or poets that we connect with on a personal level, as we are able to do with music. Instead, the experiences we do have with poetry, often in school and often unmemorable or strongly negative, shape our perception of poetry and its accessibility to us for the rest of our lives.

 If enjoying poetry is truly an exposure problem, then perhaps the improving statistics of the National Endowment for the Arts show us that the amount of poetry we see daily, weekly, monthly, has actually gone up. With poets like Rupi Kaur at more than 4 million followers on social media, and Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history reciting her poem The Hill We Climb to the nation on January 20th, modern poetry is certainly finding its way in this digital age. While our attention spans may be shrinking, as Eastman pointed out, “Something I appreciate about poetry and I think something that actually makes it suited to this moment in time with our shorter attention spans is that a lot of it is not very long… it is reading… but the thing at least that it has going for it is it’s not much reading.”

Rupi Kahr

I am water

soft enough

to offer life

tough enough  

to drown it away

When interviewing for this article I found that even when people told me they never read poetry in their free time, they did actually like poetry for an array of different reasons. Heather said she likes poetry very much, just not the “pretentious hipsters” who think that they are somehow better than the rest of us because they read poetry (don’t be a pretentious hipster). She doesn’t believe they really even enjoy poetry. Lily enjoys the interpretation of poetry and how many different people can resonate with the same work for many different reasons. Even Finnian will admit that he enjoys poetry, mostly more modern poetry, “cause old stuff’s just a pain to read” and especially Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem The Hill We Climb, which he characterized as “pretty bomb dot com” and “muy picante.”

 So give yourself a chance to rethink the opinion you formed of poetry during your high school English classes or the reasons you don’t often read poetry. Expose yourself by following a few poets you like on social media, doing some sleuthing on the web for some poetry you really connect with, or grabbing a random book of poems at the Gallery Bookstore. Maybe you’ll decide that poetry is really not for you, and that’s okay, but maybe you’ll find a poem that you think about in the shower, or on the way to work, a poem that haunts you for weeks or years to come and opens your eyes anew to the world.

Citations

Delistraty, Cody. “This Is What Happens To Your Brain When You Read Poetry.”  

https://www.thecut.com/2017/05/this-is-what-happens-to-your-brain-when-you-read-poetry.html, May 11, 2017.

Verma, Jeevika. “Poetry Provides Comfort- Through the Pandemic and Beyond.” 

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/27/991117892/how-poetry-has-helped-to-guide-people-during-the-pandemic, April 27, 2021.