Imma Read (Poetry)
I don’t have a personal definition for poetry, but I know it when I see it. In a talk on Thursday, Nov. 14, Stephanie Burt, GRD ’00, defined poetry as “an ordering of words that is not prose, but ordered for the sake of the words.” Though she followed this definition with other disjointed explanations, Burt strongly asserted that poetry isn’t a mystical enigma. She spent the hour dissecting poets while drawing an unlabeled, incomplete circle with each point. Though the drawing itself was hard to decipher as more shapes overlapped, it felt fitting.
Burt is an English professor at Harvard, co-editor for The Nation, and a poetry critic. Lily Moore-Eissenberg, SY ’20, studied under Burt over the summer, and asked her to join the board for Brink. Moore-Eissenberg also asked Burt to speak at Yale as part of the Poynter Fellowship’s series of lectures featuring media professionals.
Burt didn’t provide information about herself before diving into her talk. The event wasn’t a reading or a lecture necessarily, but a synopsis of her most recent book, Don’t Read Poetry. Contrary to its title, Burt’s book is a guide created to ease the digestion of poetry. It outlines six categories of poems, including ones in which readers identify with the speaker, poems that give a character profile, poems that represent a community, poems that have unique forms, emotionally affective poetry, and lyrical poetry.
Burt argues that people might be daunted by or even claim to dislike poetry because of education systems’ misleading portrayal of the form. If someone encounters a poem they don’t like or understand in the classroom, that can translate into disliking poetry in general. But taste in poetry, like music, depends on its purpose. Our moods change constantly, and with that, so do the poems that we enjoy at a given moment.
Academic settings hold poetry to divine standards, as if it can’t be everyday. At the beginning of the talk, Burt broached the topic of defining poetry, saying, “If you’ve spent ten minutes in any intro creative writing course, you’ll have two students arguing over whether their favorite musical artist is a poet.” We often forget the non-academic forms of poetry that seep into our lives — much of the music we listen to or the nursery rhymes we sung as kids could be considered poetry.
Our knowledge and enjoyment of poetry is tricky to explain. After Burt’s talk, which was both demystifying and riddled with inaccessible jokes, I interviewed two friends to see how, if at all, poetry has a place in their lives. One friend said that, while he has bought books of poetry such as those of Audre Lorde, he “wanted to dive in but never did.” The other friend said she’s just started getting into the craft through a weekly poetry seminar. “[I read poetry] for class every week, if not every other day,” she said. “It’s pretty much a new part of my life. I associate [reading poetry] with writing poetry…” The class has changed the way that she reads poetry, too: “I think I’ve liked poetry for several years now, but I hadn’t found poets I liked, so I wasn’t reading for pleasure.”
Though both friends easily asserted their enjoyment of poetry, they struggled to explain why they like it. The first told me about how much he cherished a certain Langston Hughes poem, explaining, “I don’t know how to approach it critically… It makes me feel something. It feels like it’s connecting back to moments I’ve had.” He quoted the poem, “‘Roam the night together’… that pulls me back to [those past moments], and it connects me to the time in which it was written.” My other friend said, as an example, that she appreciates poet Emily Skillings’ work for its internal, fragmented style and dry sense of humor.
Burt claims that there’s poetry for everyone — you just have to find it. But, for many people, that’s often easier said than done. Most people at the talk were older professors and scholars. There were a few undergraduate English students — all who have likely received some level of guidance in reading and interpreting poetry.
“I find [Audre Lorde’s poetry] inaccessible, even though I want to understand,” said my friend, who has not taken a poetry class before. “I want to give it the patience it needs. I just think I’m a bad reader. I don’t think my brain works verbally in a way that lets me really appreciate writing, even if I understand that it’s really good. I think there’s some blockage in my head where writing doesn’t land.”
Though she may have learned how to get more enjoyment out of poetry in class, my other friend still feels, “The academy of scholars of poetry can be very insular and hard to access. Certain poets [feel inaccessible], but other poets are easy to access.” She gave Mary Oliver as an example of a poet she finds more accessible than others.
Burt argued that the best poems, the ones that last, fit under many of the labels she gives, if not all. Her points began to merge like the circles on the board. The purpose of a poem is not clearly definable. Maybe it’s dismissive to agree with critics who say the purpose of poetry is its purposelessness, but I can’t tell how this is different from the answer Burt gives of there being multiple muddled purposes.
Despite its puzzling nature, my friends still continue to keep poetry in their lives. My friend who writes says she intends to keep reading poetry and to be “less disciplined about writing actual poems.” As for my friend who doesn’t write, poetry still maintains a certain allure that makes him “want to learn. I want to learn to read poetry.”
