For the love of poetry in all people

 

 It sounds as though you're not particularly interested in exploring the experience a poem wants to give you. Some people are not interested in what poems do. Some people are not interested in baseball, some are not interested in poems. If we go to a baseball game for the final score, there's no point in arriving before the ninth inning. And if we go to a poem just for the meaning, we can search the internet for a convenient paraphrase--which may or may not be there or accurate, but which is not the poem anymore than the box score is the baseball game. We have to learn to enjoy baseball or we can't enjoy it. The same again is true of poetry. I'm always concerned about the fact that we encounter poetry most often in school. School is where we learn about poems because we're not yet at the place where we can experience the poetry of poems in the way a baseball fan experiences the poetry of baseball.

Because it's the poetry in baseball that makes it fun. And it's a lack of sensitivity to that poetry that makes it boring to the uninitiated. Learning what poems do is something that happens all in the head, in the same part of the brain that does math. (There's also a poetry to math that you can't experience until you're pretty good at it. Mathematicians and physicists, echoing Keats without knowing it, will tell you that a beautiful equation is most likely to be true.) That part of your brain where you learn without experiencing is always boring. With all these things: math, baseball, poems (also grammar, cars, sewing, pottery, cooking, rearing children or raising bees or chickens--even in computers, I suppose) there is the poetry--where a part of your brain explodes with fireworks and orgasms--and there's the "what the hell does that mean? How on earth does that work?" “What in God’s name just happened?” part. Boring, frustrating. I hold out the hope that everyone loves poetry. But some people never experience it. And some people never experience it in poems.