I’ll share my experience because what else am I gonna do?
Listen, I can’t remember ever not being into poetry. But taking poetry classes in college (and engaging my English classes in high school) really got me going with actually liking the rigors of reading poetry. I don’t like to use the phrase “reading poetry,” but that’s the experience I chose to embrace in my early college years – the work of enjoying poems with the specific purpose of having something to say about them.
And usually to achieve this end goal I had to incise poems – you know, the cutting, digging, and pulling out of the poem all of its symbolism and hidden meanings and allusions and rhyme patterns, the overall extractive work called “reading” poetry. I chose to not avoid this dirty work, but enter that curious and at times hostile world of “reading” a poem in order to find anything worth bringing back to the surface – even if it was only a short way down – to talk about in an essay or discussion. I chose to do the exercise, really, of “reading” poetry.
And in doing poetry that way, I was learning, really, how to be an explorer. I was learning how to dig. I was learning a new way. I was learning a way.
And during these years in college I took an interest in what we might call the classic voices of literature. I wanted to see what exactly made someone become a giant of the genre, even if I wasn’t really with it. But I made sure to, at least, attend to what they did.
And I became intentional about finding poets to “read.” I’d go through poetry books sitting in shelves at local libraries, especially by poets I was studying in college or would likely come across in an English major environment. I wanted the “literary” experience that many people understandably shun because I wanted to know what all the fuss was about and how the fuss could be important.
And I treated the experience of reading poetry by myself like an event. I’d set aside time to read and go to a special place to do it, usually a library or my car. I kind of made reading poetry a sacred or personal moment.
I made sure to participate in communal settings, as well, where poetry was discussed or shared amongst people, whether in poetry classes or poetry readings. There’s just a way that community can make the unalivest of things suddenly speak.
Of course in my early college years I still wrote my own work and took opportunities to share it with others. I appreciated both the private enterprise of reading and writing and the communal joy of sharing ideas and work.
Where to start with poetry? Start where you’re at. As you go, just pick up on poets, or anyone who is saying something that you notice you’re hearing. Put yourself in places where you’re invited to give attention to things being said about poetry. Take an interest in the truth that you’re always invited, every moment and no matter where, to recognize your own consciousness. Be interested in being alive. Take an even deeper interest in living.