I’ve been reading… poetry. There I’ve said it. The very word repels – like dogshit – we’re sorry we stepped close. Some of you may read it – a show of hands – but do you discuss it in company? Maybe in an esoteric reading group that gathers online from far and wide: the Internet is a genius at convening coteries. But in casual conversation – with a friend or neighbor, say? Just uttering the word marks one as old hat, a Miss Havisham trapped in yesteryear – unless one’s deploying it to flatter: “her key lime pie was pure poetry!”

In college and for maybe a decade after, I dreamed of being a poet. That’s how old I am. I wasn’t foolhardy enough to risk it as a career – I longed both to eat and shine – but how about “on the side”, like Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive nine to five, or my mentor Robert Penn Warren, best-selling novelist, professor, person of letters? I still scribble a poem occasionally, the way I sneak a second Reese’s peanut butter cup, because I can’t help myself – when no one’s looking – but my real time I devote to prose, my time off to screens. The prose I favor – discursive, literary – is likewise on the wane, unless served in dollops – of, say, six hundred words? The folks I know still read – actual books! – only not poems. (Some elected officials – and recent college graduates – admit to never reading. They haven’t time, they explain.)

The reasons for poetry’s decline aren’t mysterious. Poems are hard to read if they’re any good; Americans prefer ease. Poems must be savored in silence, these days dispelled by engine-roar, piped music, and electronic grunts. Poems demand, as a precondition, not just literacy but language-love, and we like movies better. That poetry isn’t fashionable dissuades neophytes from trying it. Granted, legions are writing what they call poetry, but that’s often a faux occupation, like “consultant” in business.

If poetry’s passe, why waste an instant wrestling it? I live to converse – with you: why not ingest more shareable matter? Turning a page of poetry – slowly – am I playing hooky from my purpose? If not, what am I up to?

I read poems for fun – hard, exasperating, sometimes infuriating fun, but fun even so.  I enjoy the grapple. What’s this soul trying to say – to me – across this chasm? Poetry, unlike prose, isn’t “about” anything, doesn’t instruct or implicate the intellect. Poetry’s ambition, like painting’s or music’s, is to cause us to feel -- more lovemaking than explaining or exhorting.

When a poem succeeds – piercing our armor of indifference – it’s miraculous. It doesn’t happen often, even with the best. Even almighty Shakespeare can be dull. But when it happens, one blinks dazzled: how with mere words and sounds did the poet pull this off? How did she or he get to me? The appeal of a novel may be explained, in part, by its plot; of an essay by its thought. A good poem enchants – abracadabra – collapsing walking sticks into handkerchiefs, tugging rabbits out of hats – how on earth!

This whetting of the intellect excites intensely if you’re susceptible. It’s like panning for gold, wide-eyed, greedy for spiritual wealth. It renews one’s reverence for language’s heft. Words, like pocket change, get rubbed dull with usage (I remember pocket change!). Most words lie inert on the page like days-old fish. A poem that works makes every word feel freshly caught.

Watching a pro athlete play makes an aspiring kid want to try. So I with poems. “Always be a poet, even in prose,” wrote Baudelaire.