Why I Don't Read Poetry

I'm not really going to answer this question.

I don’t know.

I love poetry. I write poetry. Yet I rarely read poetry. Why is that?

I love poetry mostly, I think, because my grandfather loved poetry. He had a favourite poem to quote for every occasion. I didn’t always realize his quotations were poetry. The quotation I still remember best from him was a line he said almost every time we went to the beach (and we went to Crescent Beach, near our home, quite often when I was a boy—my sandbox, which granddad made for me, was actually filled with sand we carted home from that beach) was “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” It wasn’t until I read Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in English Literature in Grade 12 that I realized that Granddad’s quote was a line from that poem.

In the sonnet that I wrote to celebrate my favourite poetry professor (and, in many ways, my mentor), Professor Lee M. Johnson, I wrote,

I knew I loved those poems Grandad read
out loud to me before I went to bed,

and maybe that’s part of the answer. My high-school English teacher was famous for always saying, “Poetry is meant to be read and re-read,” but perhaps, while true, that’s not quite adequate. Poetry is meant to be read and re-read aloud.

I’m not convinced that this is the whole of the answer, but I do think that it’s at least part of it. I recently taught a poetry appreciation class at the high-school I work at, and one of the most fun parts of it was reading poetry aloud. I even got so carried away with the joy of the experience, at one point, that I read the whole of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to them, despite my intention to only read the opening to it in order to explain the reference to it in one of my favourite C.S. Lewis poems, “A Confession”. Poetry is compressed language, which uses as many layers of meaning as possible, including, in the best poems, what is audible.

But this doesn’t adequately explain why, in a culture in which the audible is resurgent, I am not alone in not reading poetry. And, as a result, I miss out.

Fortunately, because of my abiding love of and history with (and writing of) poetry, I realize I miss out. Just recently, upon re-reading the ending of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (in preparation for my Doxacon talk which gave rise to my The Deaths of Arthur podcast), I ran across this brilliant theological gem, which crowns the end of it:

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

That image, “the whole round earth is every way bound by gold chains [of prayer] about the feet of God” has stuck with me—as do all of the really great poetic images.

Even more recently, I was blessed, by the serendipity of Substack’s algorithm, combined with my own occasional professions of love for poetry, to run across this gem, in

Devin Kelly

’s post on Linda Pastan’s “Imaginary Conversation”:

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

Like all great poetry, it helps us see the weary, worn world in a new way. “…why the last? Why not live each day as if it were the first—all raw astonishment”. I also love Devin’s comment on the poem and on poetry: “I love when a poem says but why? Or when a poem says why not? Or when a poem says if or only if or could or have you ever or do you ever or ever wonder if?”

And, given this observation, I can’t help but share my own poem here:

The Fall

Why?

Why not?


Why suffering?

Love.


Why conflict?

Love.


Why hate?

Love.


Because Love allows choice—
          And its consequences.

Because Love demands Truth,
          And consequences.

Because while hate kills,
          Love dies—

          And lives.
          And gives—

All.

While I have no delusions about being or becoming a poet for the ages (although, given the current state of poetry that I’ve just noted, it’s not clear there can be a poet for the ages in our culture), I’ve found poetry to be helpful for wrestling with—and even, to some extent, sorting out some of the deeper experiential truths of life. Hence, one of the many personal projects that I will probably never finish is a sort of memoir of my early life structured around the poetry that I’ve written that has become part of a sort of personal “canon” for me. And, given my already-expressed intention to use Substack as a sort of “rough draft, an experimental playground, where I hope to ‘geek out’, from my personal perspective - which is naturally shaped, in large part, by my Orthodox Christian beliefs - about whatever geeky subjects happen to strike my fancy”, including poetry, I’ll probably be sharing a bit more of my poetry (under the “WordPlay” tag) with some of those personal autobiographical reflections here.

As well as just geeking out about poetry whenever I run across something really good! Why not live out each day as Eve awaking?