I Don't Understand Poetry

I must admit something, and it's embarrassing: I don't understand a lot of poetry. I realize this despite having spent more than a decade of my life publically identifying myself as a poet (which, to be fair, is not a long time in this artistic pursuit, and also, to be honest, comes with a lot of stereotypical behavior). I have multiple degrees, attend workshops, read the classics, and write a good amount of my own poetry. At points, I've received some positive feedback and warm receptions to my ideas. On paper, I've got all the tools I need. Then why do I feel like such a confounded failure?

As a senior in high school, I visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. I'd read about Mark Rothko before I went. His work is pretty and colorful, but its meaning and value stymied me. I hoped I'd really "get" the paintings by seeing them in person. I remember Orange and Tan dominating a wall in the middle of a gallery. I spent time viewing the work from different angles and distances: close up, to the side, then backing away and seeing the totality, and even further, seeing the painting within the context of other works in the gallery. I wasn't going to leave that room until I "understood." And I didn't dislike the art. But, for as long as I stayed in that location, I felt no rush of emotion. Nothing washed over or built up inside of me at that moment, no lightbulb above my head. I'd read about people breaking down in the presence of Rothko's paintings. Why wasn't I, too, overcome? Was I emotionally too detached?

I have physical and emotional reactions to music. I'm not a musician by any stretch of the imagination, but like many in the modern Western age, I've probably been exposed to tens of thousands of songs in my life, largely without even trying. Within seconds, I can feel the rhythms that make me want to dance, the atmosphere that makes me want to cozy up with a nice warm beverage, the ecstasy of celebrating a beautiful moment, or the expansiveness that feels like staring longingly into the night sky. The effect is immediate and afforded without any formal training.

But that's kind of a lie, isn't it? With music playing such a strong part of popular culture and our shared cultural moments, and the fact that we've all been exposed to thousands of songs in our lifetimes, aren't many of us experts on contemporary music? Isn't the life we've lived a kind of formal training? Music is so commonplace it's a part of how we process our own histories, fashions, and cultural milestones. Maybe a random individual can't discuss contemporary music in terms of theories, chord progressions, and movements, but it wouldn't be surprising to hear them discuss the music in terms of influences, aesthetics, sounds, and genres.

In contrast to the commonality of music, there's an appreciation of visual art that is underdeveloped in the general populace. I would volunteer that I'm part of that group. What kind of fine art paintings does an individual encounter daily? Even if the answer is plenty, I would posit that the skills needed to speak articulately about fine art are rare. How does one, for instance, make the leap from still-life, renaissance-style paintings, the likes of which flood popular museums, to Mondrian, even if they have a gut instinct to like one over the other?

The same is true for poetry. While poetry is making a strong comeback in recent years, its readership is but a fragment of the readership of other literary pursuits. It exists in popular culture as a weird mechanism used to heighten a moment's gravitas or harken to a previous, more refined time, even though aesthetically, poets haven't written in those fashions for a hundred years. Rarely does a contemporary poem become part of the culture outside of distinct literary and academic circles. And even when one does, the ability of a bystander to highlight why a poem has succeeded, or conversely why a poem fails, would be slim.

Is that because poetry is too academic, gatekept, and elitist? It can certainly feel that way to anyone forced into learning about poetry at school. But, I think the answer lies in where we encounter poetry: if we aren't encountering it in journals and magazines and books and tweets and YouTube performances, making individual discoveries, and only as a mechanism used by other arts and artists or systematically drilled into us, how can we ever expect to develop our own sensibilities and tastes? If all we ever hear of poetry is someone else's opinion, how can we ever form our own?

When I left school, I was completely lost in poetry, and that shattered me because if I hadn't become the artist I wanted to be by then, what was all of that education for? In undergrad, I developed an idea of who I was as an artist that was, admittedly, very myopic. I had not been exposed to many contemporary poets outside of a few anthologies and had not pursued them beyond the classroom (which, to be clear, is entirely my own fault). I was almost militaristic in my preference for classic and formal verse because that's the world in which I found myself succeeding. But then, in grad school, I started to open up my field of view (though, at the time, it felt like I was a clam being shucked). Suddenly, everything I thought I knew about myself and the craft became subject to question. The poems I was proud of now embarrassed me for how unoriginal they seemed. My images and metaphors were cliches, my voice a relic, and all the hard work wrangling lines into rhyme and meter were seen as unnecessary, distracting, and outmoded. I wanted to sing, but I couldn't muster a single note without feeling like a hack.

I took a workshop with a well-known editor some years later, years in which I wrote little and read even less. He shared a poem from one of the workshop attendees and asked us to explicate the poem. My mind immediately went towards counting metrical feet and looking for a form, which was plainly not what the editor meant. A few moments passed when no one spoke, all of the attendees trying to think of something clever to say. And then the editor said something that really cut to my heart: this isn't hard. You are poets. You all should be able to speak fluently about this poem in terms of poetics and craft immediately.

I knew that language at one point but in a completely different context. I had no contemporary frame to compare this one specific poem. I couldn't explain who the poet was reacting to, what they were doing on the page visually, the social and political ramifications of the poem, the liminal spaces between words and phrases that the audience would dwell in, etc. As the workshop evolved, I could see and recognize all of those things, but it's obvious that I hadn't interacted with enough contemporary poetry to form the proper understanding.

When someone writes a love poem in English, they are unknowingly (or knowingly) part of the grand tradition of English love poems (and poems translated into English). Does that mean you can't enjoy a love poem if you don't understand its poetic lineage? Of course not. But having read a wide variety of poetry can only heighten the ability to see the distinctions and similarities between poets, to catch their subtle nods and more overt shout-outs, to see them responding to the immediate world around them as well as the great history, and most importantly, to see where new ground is being broken.

So, when I say I don't understand a lot of poetry, the admission is not one of frustration with the way poetry is written today. It is, in fact, a frustration of my own self-inflicted lack of exposure. And it's not as if I wasn't being told to read widely at every step of my poetic education. It was, in fact, demanded of me. But I took from all these contemporary poets a little sliver of craft focused on form and meter. If a poet wasn't working within those constraints, I moved on. How freaking wrong is that? Reading poetry shouldn't be an act of understanding what's important to yourself but what's important to the poem and the poet. Developing preferences and influences naturally comes later.

In this way, I've been very self-centered in poetry for my entire education. This realization fills me with shame. Over the last few months, I've tried coming to terms with my biases, and I'm starting to make peace with them so that I can grow and, more importantly, so I can simply start enjoying more poetry, understanding more poetry, and taking part.

This brings me back to why I wasn't moved by Rothko. Without knowing where art was before Rothko joined the scene, I couldn't appreciate how revolutionary his ideas were. If I didn't know what his contemporaries were accomplishing, I couldn't see his individual greatness. If I didn't know the language of art, I could not understand what his paintings were saying to me. To put it plainly, I didn't know what was at stake when I viewed Rothko. It's as if you read the end of a book before reading the rest of it. When a central character dies on the last page, that death is meaningless and unearned. But if you read the entire book and understand that character's journey, their triumphs, and suffering, that death becomes real, and all matter of emotions boil to the surface.

I'm still not saying you have to understand all of the poetry just to enjoy a single poem. But it's a matter of exposure. How challenging would one rock and roll song be if you had only heard classical compositions? What if instead of one rock and roll song, you heard twenty songs by twenty different bands? One poem in your life may not lead to an emotional outpouring, but what about another twenty?

Is contemporary poetry challenging? It can be, but so can any new practice. And comparatively, for all of contemporary poetry's difficulties, there are equal barriers to classical poetry, like outdated language, archaic symbols, and cultural representations that are increasingly less and less like our own.

We're not going to live in a society where poetry is hung on the walls of every house and championed, though that would be nice. But, if we're serious about poetry, we must meet it where it exists. We shouldn't be upset for not "getting" poetry to begin with, just as we shouldn't be upset about not hitting a home run on our first at-bat, or knowing everything about a new job on the first day, or burning a few chickens the first time we cook for ourselves, or tapping into a curb the first time we drive a car. "I don't understand poetry" isn't an excuse. It's a side effect of simply not having done enough of it.