I wake pondering the mystery of poetry.

No particular poem, though that’s fine sport, but the expressive form itself.

I hate reading poems, much as I love to. I clench my jaw, wince anticipating disappointment. A poem can’t be “just OK,” like a TV series: either it thrills – which is rare – or it thuds. Roulette players may feel this way, hope their only reliable return.

From the Romantic era onward, even the best poets wrote unbearable poems. Before then, poetry functioned more like prose, as a natural form of discourse. Shakespeare’s, Milton’s and Pope’s verse had a story to tell. Even today it doesn’t sound odd for Romeo and Juliet to coo in iambic pentameter.

Lyric poetry functions more like music. Either a song lofts you or you’re earthbound, tetchy on the runway. When a lyric poem hits, it’s magical – abracadabra, you’re winging – but the odds are long.

I read poetry to get to know its maker. Who’s pressing that pen and why? A poet who succeeds becomes my intimate. When they fail – which is more common – I feel bad for them: we are both more alone. Some of my professors taught that poems were objects to be judged, like a “well-wrought urn.” They are that surely, but if they were only that, why bother with them? I read for solace. Can you hug a thing?

Why read poems if disappointment is predictable? Why not spend my scarce minutes with makers more certain to amuse?

Poetry, for me, resembles dating. How I hated to date! Would I appeal? Would she? Did my words and ways do justice? If we failed to hit it off, whose fault? Might we go all the way? (Nearly never, alas.) The hunt was laborious and grim but what choice did I have? I live for my Other – I can’t manage life alone.

I got lucky in love – finally! – but my loneliness remains insatiable. To exist I need you – and forbears whose sighs anticipate my own. Conversation is my consolation, together my only way to be.

How does one find the maker behind the poem? Listen hard. I ask the poet the same questions I ask myself: why did you choose this topic? Why did you make this this way? What do these words reveal about your nature? What are you not telling me? Plenty of poets try to fake it but that’s not possible, the stench of deceit is too evident.

No revelation is more revealing than a true poem. That’s because poems are condensations, the essence of an instant. This was Tennyson’s idea:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedFlower in the crannied wall,I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, all in all, I should know what God and man is.

That flower in the wall would tell you all you needed to know about everything – if you looked hard enough. Study a poem as nearly as Tennyson did that flower and behold the world!

One regrettable effect of aging is getting finickier. The more excellence I’ve encountered, the higher the bar for the rest. Could be my taste grows inelastic like my sinews, but I don’t think so. I know what’s good, by my lights. Encountering a good true contemporary poet, the blaze is blinding.

My study is littered with poem-tomes I pick up, read a few pages, then set down feeling drab. I chide my betters for not being better. Their shortcomings chasten me. Making beauty with words is so hard.