Poetry is about grasping what you can’t understand

Poetry, especially modern poetry, has a reputation for being difficult to understand, probably because many poets challenge themselves to describe the indescribable. People approach poems to find answers to their questions. I can’t tell you how many times a classmate or even a professor approached me to ask “what exactly” a poem was about. The answer would often be truthfully, nothing and a hundred experiences all knitted together like puzzle pieces.

My advice is to start by just reading through the poem and noticing what you notice. Don’t pressure yourself to understand every line. Just pretend you’re sitting on the beach, letting the tide wash up and over your toes.

A good poem will start working its magic on you, whether you’re a skilled reader or not. I won’t pretend to achieve this in my own work, but if you’re reading In Memory of W.B. Yeats, Auden will speak to you, at least a little.

Frankly, it takes practice releasing how you’re used to reading essays and instruction manuals, looking for something to apply or argue with. You don’t read poetry for information. You read poetry to understand something that can’t be well stated any other way.

For example, the only writing about God or spirituality, I find even slightly moving is poetry. When you’re talking about someone that’s purportedly omnipresent and experientially absent, how else can you approach him but through the slanted light of a poem? Essays about God tend to deal in absolutes, ultimately half-truths, that leave me unsatisfied and sometimes annoyed. Only in a poem can you discuss something and even understand it a little without eliminating its mystery.

In the same way, an essay is not the best medium to explore grief and suffering. The elegy is one of the oldest forms of poetry. We’ve been writing to commemorate the lives of those we’ve lost for almost as long as we’ve been able to write.

Still, no elegy brings back the living, and even the best poem is cold comfort for loss.

Tennyson writes in his epic poem on grief, In Memoriam:

I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel;

For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.

Tennyson wrestles with the failure of language to capture truthfully the depths of his grief over his dear friend’s passing truthfully. And yet, he continues to write nearly 3,000 lines of poetry while grieving.

Poetry is for what can’t be spoken any other way. I think we desperately need the nuance and mystery that poetry allows in our soundbite world.

It’s hard to convince you that poetry is worth your while if you’ve never experienced the vision an excellent poem can provide. Reading a truly excellent poem reminds me of putting on glasses for the first time. It wows you in the moment and leaves your vision a little clearer forever.

One poem I’ll suggest as a starting block for people wanting to dip a toe into reading poems is All My Friends are Finding New Beliefs by Christian Wiman. He takes care to make sure readers can follow along with him while still delivering a profound and beautiful lyrical experience (harder than it looks!)

If this piece inspires you to read a little poetry, let me know what you think!