How to Like Poetry
A sympathetic guide for the perplexed
1. Three Ways of Looking at the Grand Canyon
Imagine that you are being chased by a cougar across the rim of the Grand Canyon. You would be surrounded by breathtaking beauty, but you wouldn’t even notice it.
Now imagine that you are Mr. Moneybags, a rapacious mining executive. Standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, your eyes would seek out streaks of blue and green on the rock faces: telltale signs of copper. You would see the Canyon not as an object of beauty or contemplation but as something that could be used.
Now imagine that you are a tourist standing comfortably at the edge of the Grand Canyon. You’ve looked at plenty of landscape paintings and photographs, and you’ve been influenced by conservationist writing and thought that teaches us to see nature as beautiful, fragile, and deserving of great respect. The more you know about the Canyon and its ecosystem, the more you might be able to see its nuances and delicate details. As an informed, appreciative observer, you might look at the Canyon patiently, for a long time, with a sense of awe.
The point is: to perceive beauty, you have to pay attention in a particular way, even if the thing you’re looking at is pretty much indisputably beautiful.1
Sometimes, you can’t help but to be struck by beauty. Other times, you must learn how to pay a certain kind of attention to discover it. Many things can teach us how to pay attention. As babies, we watch our parents’ eyes to see what they are looking at. Art critics teach us how to pay attention to brushstrokes, color choice, composition, and symbolism in paintings. And the smartphone teaches us us to pay a certain kind of attention, too.
The question of how to pay attention is a question with very high stakes, for what we pay attention to is all we really have.
2. Poetry is Boring
We might regard a person who is completely indifferent to the Grand Canyon as abnormal and perhaps even deficient. We might consider with pity and perhaps even disgust an iPad kid who cannot tear himself away from the addictive screen to behold the glory of the world. But most people don’t feel the same sense of pity and disgust toward people who don’t like poetry. Many people are happy and unashamed to say that they simply don’t like poetry. Nearly every student I have ever spoken to about poetry has told me this.
I think that’s OK, actually. Not everyone has to like poetry. I think there are many ways to live a wonderful, intellectually rich life without ever having enjoyed poetry. But this essay is written for a certain kind of reader: a person who loves fiction and song but who could never quite get into poetry, and who has a niggling feeling that they are missing out.
The beauty of poetry, like the beauty of the Grand Canyon, requires that you pay a certain kind of attention. But while the beauty of the Grand Canyon is very easy for most people to perceive, the beauty of poetry (like that of modern painting or art music) is not always so obvious.
The first problem with poetry is that it can be boring. But boringness, like beauty, is often more about how you perceive an object rather than an intrinsic quality of that object. Who has not, when in the proper mood, perhaps as a child (or on mind-altering substances), sat and been fascinated by the structure of veins in a leaf or the color of a blade of grass? Is a leaf or a blade of grass intrinsically interesting? No. Most of the time, I don’t find leaves or blades of grass very interesting. But when thought about the right way, a blade of grass can be an object of extraordinary wonder. It can, as it turns out, be very fun to look at a leaf for, like, ten minutes.
The poet Walt Whitman knew this. Here’s what he wrote about how you might look at grass.
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Looking at the grass, Whitman doesn’t feel certainty—he feels bewilderment. What is this stuff? He has no idea. So he starts guessing.
Maybe the grass is “the flag of my disposition”—maybe it reflects Whitman’s hopeful mood back to him. Maybe grass is a sign that God is flirting with Whitman by dropping His handkerchief on the ground, or a sign of the majesty of Nature, God’s creation. Maybe looking at grass makes Whitman think about how just as green and fragrant for everyone, white or black, Indians, congressmen. Or maybe, in this selection’s most dazzling line, it is the “uncut hair of graves”—maybe looking at grass makes you think of the cycle of life, of the generations of animals and plants that have died, become soil, and been reborn into new life.
Grass can mean all of these things, Whitman’s saying. But you have to be ready to be bewildered, and you have to be ready to make guesses, which are very possibly silly and wrong.
Back in 1855, when Whitman published this poem, “grass” was a name for poetry. I think that, when Whitman tells us how “grass” can mean many things at the same time—the Lord’s handkerchief, the uncut hair of graves—he is looking at grass the way we should look at poetry if we want to become fascinated by it. If you ask Whitman what grass is, he says, first, “I don’t know,” but he doesn’t stop there. He moves on to “maybe this, maybe this, maybe this, maybe all of this.” And this way of looking at poetry (I mean, grass) unlocks all sorts of strange, even unreasonable, reflections.
When my students tell me that poetry is boring, I am convinced that they really mean that it confuses them. Like the child in the poem, I bring them handfuls of “grass,” and they say, like Whitman, “I don’t know what that is.” They look at these words, and for whatever reason—the language is confusing or dense or archaic—they can’t immediately understand what is happening. Then, they get worried and maybe even insecure. They want to understand what the poetry means. When the meaning does not present itself, they get frustrated. They stop at “I don’t know.” What Whitman teaches us is that, if we want to explore all of the meanings of grass, we can’t stop at “I don’t know.” We have to move on to the second part, where we make silly, conflicting, perhaps outrageous guesses. That is, as it turns out, where much of the fun is.
Poetry often has very little to offer in terms of clear meanings. But it makes up for it by giving us rich fields in which we can play with meaning, saying to one another: “maybe this, maybe this, maybe all of this.”
3. But How?
It’s often hard, though, to look at a poem, become bewildered, and then push onward, through boredom and confusion, to get to the guesses. It’s also hard to get in the spacey sort of reverie wherein gazing at a blade of grass, a leaf, or a poem becomes fascinating and pleasant. At times, with a buzzing phone in the pocket or an anxious and preoccupied brain, it can also be hard to appreciate the obvious beauty of the Grand Canyon.
Getting into the right headspace for poetry can feel particularly difficult, in part because, when it comes to reading, we are taught to avoid “maybe” and get to the point. Think of the “reading comprehension” standardized tests that students are required to take. The whole idea of these tests is that there is a single, correct meaning to a text, and that the best reading techniques are the ones that allow us to quickly and accurately identify that meaning.
Taken too far, this model of reading can lead lead readers to look at texts like Mr. Moneybags looks at the Grand Canyon: as something to be mined. Writing and language become nothing more than the media through which clear, unambiguous, intended meaning is communicated. The goal of interpretation is to extract meaning from language.
Language is a tool as well as a medium for art, and there’s nothing wrong with clear, unambiguous meaning. At the same time, if this form of “reading comprehension”—reading as the retrieval of a single, correct meaning—is the primary way that students are taught to look at and interpret a text, can it be surprising that they become frustrated with poems, especially poems that do not immediately yield up an obvious or singular meaning?
Compound this way of looking at language with the familiar problems of what some economists call our “attention economy”—in which every second of your attention is being monetized, vied for, and even controlled by sophisticated technology—and it’s easy to see why poetry might seem impossible to enjoy. If the thing that most often teaches you to pay attention is a social media app, which is designed to compel your attention in ways that maximize profits by stimulating you in ways that maximize your exposure to advertisements, you may find yourself deeply discomfited by the experience of boredom or confusion. The difficulty of poetry sometimes feels like it’s pushing us away; in a world where every advertisement, post, and video is trying to draw us in, we don’t know how to react. If you eat nothing but Sour Patch Kids, even a sweet, cold, ripe plum will taste bland. It takes time to let your tastebuds adjust.
So how does one get out of this bind? How is it possible to pay a new kind of attention to poetry, even if one finds it boring at first?
A few suggestions:
Be OK not knowing. Like Whitman, expect that you might be bewildered or confused by what you read. Accept this; revel in it if you can, and if you can’t, simply force yourself to exist in the state of not knowing for, say, five minutes. I have a hunch that this is good for your mind, although I don’t know for sure. Don’t look up interpretations of the poem right away; don’t Google what it means. Just sit there and try to think, “maybe this, maybe this.” This feeling of being suspended between knowing and not-knowing is part of the fun, not a problem to be avoided.
Assume that the poem is good. If you can’t understand what a poem means, you have to take a leap of faith: assume that the poem expresses something that will be so interesting, moving, funny, or otherwise valuable to you that it will be worth all the trouble of reading and paying attention to it. Don’t start reading poetry, as a beginner, trying to critically evaluate how good a particular poem is. If you haven’t had the experience of loving a poem, you’re not ready for the experience of hating one. Read some well-loved poems, perhaps in an anthology, and try to understand, as viscerally as possible, what it is that readers who love poetry see in it.
Don’t be afraid of being silly. You can imagine Walt Whitman as a stoner at a house party: “Dude…maybe this grass is, like, the uncut hair of graves.” The group of people around him grimace and shuffle away, murmuring to one another, What is this guy talking about? There is something potentially foolish in finding beauty and meaning in a world in which both often seem to be in short supply, and where baseless speculation makes you seem, to others, like a bit of a space cadet. If it is important to you that all of your experiences be rationally defensible to anyone who questions you, you may find poetry difficult to like. It’s a game of “maybe”s, not “is”s. If you are too afraid of going out on a limb, being wrong, or finding meaning where there is none, then poetry may be a locked box to you.
Sit with it. For a while. Spend five whole and interrupted minutes with a short poem. (This is harder than it sounds—I mean five whole minutes.) Try and think about, say, three things it might mean. Don’t check anything, message anyone, listen to music, talk, etc. This will, at first, be unpleasant, just as meditating is often unpleasant; but if you have the ability to do this daily for a few weeks, I think that enjoyment will come.
Talk about it with someone. Share what you noticed, what shades of meaning you thought you could see. Tell someone: “this is the flag of my disposition, our of hopeful green stuff woven.” Then listen to what someone else says: “Really? I thought it was the uncut hair of graves!” You will be surprised to see how different their ideas might be than yours. You may also be surprised to find how both interpretations make sense, even if they are mutually exclusive.
A poet, of course, put all of this much more succinctly than I can. Mary Oliver wrote these lines in her poem “Sometimes.” They have been so widely screen-capped and shared that they would have dissolved into mealy, Hallmark cliché if they didn’t elegantly express something true and important:
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
4. What is the Reward?
Effectively rewiring your brain’s attentional faculties in order to appreciate poetry is difficult—probably difficult in the way that meditation, another practice of intentionally directing the mind, can be difficult.2 Reader, you may be interested in trying some of the steps I’ve outlined, but they will require some perseverance. Why should you bother to do something that is difficult and, at times, boring?
Scientists have recently begun to measure what happens to the brain when it encounters poetry. The evidence isn’t great—the sample sizes are small, and sometimes the methodologies are a little loose—but here are some findings: aesthetic experiences are very pleasurable, and poetry can cause us to enter emotional peak states, shown by experiences of chills, goosebumps, and brain activation in the pleasure centers of the brain. Ambiguous haiku can induce feelings of awe and nostalgia. It’s very difficult to establish, scientifically, whether reading poetry will make you, for example, happier or more moral, although there is some evidence that reading “striking” texts like ambiguous poems induces self-reflection, trains cognitive ability, can enhance theory of mind, and induces a sense of “stillness.”
There are other rewards, though, that are probably more difficult to measure but which still merit some discussion. I want to reflect on one other benefit of reading poetry: it is an exercise in freedom of attention.
The philosopher William James distinguished between “passive, reflex, non-voluntary, effortless” attention—the kind of attention we pay when things grab our attention and hold us riveted—and “active and voluntary” attention—which happens when “we resist the attractions of more potent stimuli and keep our mind occupied with some object that is naturally unimpressive.” James thought that it was possible to intentionally direct our attention for only a few seconds, but if we ask new questions about an object that first appears to us as boring, we can induce the feeling of passive, sustained, effortless attention. If you try, over and over, asking new questions, trying to see things from new angles, you can sort of trick your brain into becoming absorbed in something that used to seem boring.
Consumptive social media is designed to impose upon our minds “passive, reflex, non-voluntary, effortless attention.” It is a technology that directs your attention on your behalf, that seeks to lead you by the nose, attentionally speaking, wherever the owners of the social media companies would like you to go. (That is to say, toward spending as much time as possible being exposed to advertisements.)
This is not a condition of mental freedom. James wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” The contemporary attention economy is an attempt to train your attention on what someone else has decided you should attend to. There’s very little agreement happening in this arrangement: it is a mode of entertainment as mental control.3
It seems to me, then, that the way to take control of your own attentional faculties is, as James puts it, to resist the attractions of more potent stimuli and to focus on some object that is naturally unimpressive. Learning to like poetry is not just about appreciating one of the most ancient art forms and unlocking a world of enjoyment. It is also about exercising important mental muscles that allow one greater control over one’s attention. That is to say, reading poetry is practice for exercising agency over one’s experience of the world. It is a model for attentional freedom.
5. This is Just To Say
As usual, there is a poem that does this better than I could: William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say”:
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
You might scoff at this: is this even a poem? It looks more like a note that was taped to the refrigerator—Williams added line breaks and stanza breaks, but otherwise, it’s unimpressive. Nothing much to it. There are no clever rhymes, no profound or inspiring thoughts, no ambiguity or depth. It’s just a note that is labeled as if it were “poetry.” Is that really all it takes to turn something into a poem?
The literary theorist Stanley Fish thinks so. In “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” Fish tells a story about a set of two classes he taught at the University at Buffalo. The first class was about linguistics, and they met at 9:30 a.m. The second class was about literature, and they met at 11:00 a.m. One day, during his linguistics course, Fish wrote down the names of a bunch of linguists on the chalkboard. After the linguistics class was over, Fish drew a box around all of the names and wrote “page 43” in the top right-hand corner.
At 11:00, the literature students all filed into the classroom. Fish told them that the names he had written on the board were a religious poem. The class started dissecting this list of names as if it were poetry. One of the names was “Thorne,” for example, so the students started drawing connections to Biblical ideas like the crown of thorns that Jesus wore to the cross.
On first blush, this seems like a funny and unflattering story about English majors, always all too ready to read complicated meanings into texts that don’t really mean that much. Making mountains, interpretively, out of molehills. We might say that these students make an error by failing to notice that words on the chalkboard weren’t particularly poetic: if the students really were experts, perhaps they would be able to look at these words, determine that they were not poetry, and respond that there was no “deeper meaning” to the words on the chalkboard.
Instead, these students did something foolish and wonderful: they said, “Maybe this, maybe this, maybe this.” Through an intentional act of paying a certain kind of attention, they created intricacy and meaning where before there was none. Fish writes: “Skilled reading is usually thought to be a matter of discerning what is there, but…[skilled reading] is a matter of knowing how to produce what can thereafter be said to be there…Interpreters do not decode poems; [interpreters] make them.” When we interpret something as if it were poetry—as if it meant something interesting—then we will discover, lo and behold, that there is something interesting there.
Williams places a note that might be taped on someone’s refrigerator into a book labeled “poetry.” He inserts line breaks so that the text looks like a poem on the page. Like Stanley Fish, Williams (and his publisher, who printed and bound the book) uses his cultural authority to claim: “this is a poem!” In doing so, he invites his reader to look at the poem in a particular way: as if it were beautiful and meaningful.
I can’t say, in the final analysis, what this poem “means” exactly. What is this thing? I don’t know. But now, it seems to me that, by inviting his reader to look at an everyday object as if it were meaningful and beautiful, Williams challenges his readers: if we were to look at our everyday lives as if they were poems—if we paid the right kind of attention—what would we see?
Note: Nirvana Shahriar made a similar argument a while ago in this great post. I thought about kiboshing this essay, but after tinkering with it a while, I figured that it was different enough to justify posting.
This could get more complicated than I’m suggesting here: Mr. Moneybags might be struck by beauty at the same that he sees the Canyon as something to be used. Perhaps he even enjoys the fact that he can sully something beautiful, or the beauty fills him with intense pre-emptive regret for the thing he’s about to do. But I think the general point still stands.
I don’t know—I don’t really meditate.
Chris Hayes’ book The Sirens’ Call has a good chapter about how social media and smartphones compel our attention.
I think there's something to add: sound. Hear the poem in your head. Find the rhythm, the sound of the words. It's like a song lyrics: you can't always make out the words, but the music communicates.
Nice explanation. You really have a talent for this.
I'd add that there's one other way to get people to like poetry, and that's by writing it. I'm not convinced that poetry's made for passive reception like novels. If we could just bring back occasional verse...