Sometimes I find myself reading unfamiliar poems. I wonder why.

For pleasure, yes, but of a curious sort, for most poems disappoint. Lyric poetry can’t be OK: if it’s not magic, it’s tragic, wasting a reader’s time and an author’s hopes. Prose, pictures, a play can be pleasant even if so-so, but poems are hit or miss, and mostly miss, even from the best. A dozen precious gems from a lifetime of scribbling is a trove. For poems I haven’t read the casualty rate is higher, since I’ve been reading poems on an off for half a century and no acknowledged masterpiece in English is likely to have escaped my notice. I do not browse Yeats, Eliot, Frost, Emily Dickinson, and other loved ones, but return to them, as to a spiritual spa, for reliable refreshment, much as I revert to my dear composers for a fix. Unfamiliar poems I find in old anthologies, by lesser luminaries of their hour, now vanished into the maws of time.

My interest isn’t scholarly or pedagogical. Few of my acquaintances read poems and fewer still share my preferences. As a young aspiring poet erudition enticed, but where’s the kick of being knowledgeable about a subject never discussed? About baseball stats or movie stars, expertise may impress, but poems?

I do not read poems for pointers. These days I write poems as willingly as I sneeze. I can’t help myself and wish the fit would pass. Even if I extruded a poem I liked – and the chances, as I say, are slim – what would I do with it? Impose it on poor Jane, I suppose.

I browse unfamiliar poems as inveterate antiquers haunt flea markets, sniffing for finds. There’s a thrill rescuing a human artifact from obscurity, if only for an eyeblink. Maybe I’ll get lucky that way when I’m dust. One person’s detritus is another’s treasure – you never know.

I revel, too, in the spectacle of the attempt. A lyric poem is a sweaty grapple, almost sexual in its intimacy. An urgent feeling forces itself into a few patterned words. One can feel the poor poet pressing desperately to expose an ache – and failing, shipwrecked on banalities or inventions that thud. Prose writers can say what they mean more or less, plus or minus, in other words. But with a poem there are no other words, only these – soggy kindling, impossible to ignite! A bad poem is poignant for the attempt was fraught with hope.

I do not read unfamiliar poems by living authors except inadvertently, in subways or waiting rooms. I dislike disliking and with contemporary fare, alas, distaste is predictable. Safely dead poets my attention can only flatter. It’s nice to be remembered.

The company of neglected authors consoles me when I’m sad. To this we all come and it’s not so bad – peaceful, quiet. Forgiveness softens the air as in a graveyard. A poet in the throes of making envisions immortality; the old anthology reminds my pesky pride there’s no such thing.

I dive into unfamiliar poems – I just realized this – as a refuge from the distressful present. It’s like diving underwater into sweet silence. One can’t stay submerged for longer than one can hold one’s breath, but even so, the respite is restorative.

The companionship of fellow strivers for musical words insensibly comforts. Of course we fail – it’s impossible to say what one feels – but the dream is ennobling. A poem by its existence implies that you and I can be one, that we can reach past our differences to a shared humanity. This is good to know.