Just my 2 cents: I think a lot of the reason why we feel we need to “get” poetry in the first place comes from our education system. When poetry is taught in the classroom, it is always done so under the guise of there being some hidden meaning that, if you are unable to discover, makes reading the poem feel utterly useless.
Fast forward to my university and I was taught something completely different in a creative writing course — poetry is about play. It isn’t about having to inspire some deep meaning. Sometimes it can just be fun to mess around with words in a way that sounds pleasing. As others have mentioned, there’s also this notion pushed in our youth that poetry has to have perfect rhyme, or follow some scheme; but as soon as you realize that isn’t the case, combined with the fact you don’t have to be searching for some obfuscated truth within poems, you start to realize poetry has been marketed as something much different than what it really is.
That’s not to say you can’t search for deep meaning in a poem, or attempt to write something meaningful into one - but really, poetry is about play, and it should be as serious as you want it to be. For me, that realization made me “get” poetry more than I did back in my high school days.
"Introduction to Poetry"
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
You're absolutely right. Poets play with words, sounds, and ideas. And extracting the meaning shouldn't be your first aim - perhaps it should be enjoying the sound and the cadence and the imagery.
Consider the first stanza of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale:
A few things that you'll probably pick up with no effort at all:
1) the puzzlement of what "Lethe" is or what it even means
2) the joke of calling your mouth a "drain"
3) the cleverness of "being too happy in thine happiness"
4) the way the long third sentence keeps going and going, ending in the release of singing, just like a bird flies, sits on a branch, and sings "with full-throated ease"
At a first read, the poem is delightful to me just because it speaks of the happiness of a bird and the unhappiness of being human. The musicality is so lovely I want to memorize it, and bring it out whenever I see a bird or want to sing like one or fly like one.
And then you can read the reams of analysis people have drawn from this poem.
Edit: He also likes to play around with lipograms and similar constrained writing techniques, check out “Eunoia” if you are into that: https://youtu.be/zhQjfr8b9Wg?t=39
> As others have mentioned, there’s also this notion pushed in our youth that poetry has to have perfect rhyme, or follow some scheme....
This is an idea that actually makes more sense in the context of poetry as play. Schemes and poetic forms are just rules you could play by, and it’s usually more fun to play by some set of rules.
This is absolutely correct, and figuring it out is what allowed me to start enjoying literature in my 20s, after hating books in school and even university due to exactly this style of teaching.
Play is so important. My own 2c is (simply) that the further prose moves from spoken word / technical detail, the closer it gets to unrestrained abstract imagination.
Everybody is constantly translating the world into brain signals, and then translating it back again to words. And some of those translations are more visceral than others, and follow natural and playful routes to reality.
Add to it overly lyrical poems that basically have nothing interesting in them for young people (or even me). Even if there is story, it is hidden behind flowery language that feels artifical. And the whole result is just drag.
I was well into adulthood when I found out that poems can be actually made fun and pleasant.
Fast forward to my university and I was taught something completely different in a creative writing course — poetry is about play. It isn’t about having to inspire some deep meaning. Sometimes it can just be fun to mess around with words in a way that sounds pleasing. As others have mentioned, there’s also this notion pushed in our youth that poetry has to have perfect rhyme, or follow some scheme; but as soon as you realize that isn’t the case, combined with the fact you don’t have to be searching for some obfuscated truth within poems, you start to realize poetry has been marketed as something much different than what it really is.
That’s not to say you can’t search for deep meaning in a poem, or attempt to write something meaningful into one - but really, poetry is about play, and it should be as serious as you want it to be. For me, that realization made me “get” poetry more than I did back in my high school days.