When I tell people I’m a poet, I often hear one of two responses. The first is sheepish apology. “I should really read more poetry,” they say, “but —” and then break off into a shrug. They’re sure they’ve failed me in some way.

Poetry should not be the broccoli of your reading life: You shouldn’t read poems out of some sense of obligation. You should read them if you enjoy them; I just happen to believe everyone has the capacity to enjoy them. Admittedly, poetry is a different kind of reading, and when we are asked to read it in the same way we read prose — as if a reading comprehension test were to follow — we get lost.

We get lost because we’re used to prose conveying information or urging a plot along. If prose belongs to the mind, poetry belongs to the mouth and ear, the gut. I’m oversimplifying things, I admit, but there’s a reason IKEA’s manuals aren’t written as sonnets. Even when we read beautifully written, “poetic” prose (Virginia Woolf’s, for instance) we’re so focused on how the words affect plot or character that we often miss the music of the words themselves.

It’s not that poetry can’t do plot (think Robert Browning) or character (think Milton’s Satan), but in poetry everything else is secondary to sound. Even a poet as brainy and difficult as T. S. Eliot remarked that experiencing poetry is more a bodily process than an intellectual one. This is why I have complained about teachers who show their students a poem and immediately ask, “What does it mean?”

Because the answer is always: lots of things. For instance, when I read this line by the new poet laureate, W. S. Merwin:

This is the black sea-brute bulling through wave-wrack,

The sense-maker in me tries to grasp the literal situation — a huge sea creature swimming — and, an instant later, the graduate student in me starts to recognize that Merwin is playing on the alliterative verse of the Anglo-Saxons, the meter of Beowulf.

But none of this is worth thinking about if the line isn’t first musical, if I don’t delight to hear the plosive B sounds urging the line along or the subtle internal rhyme of “black” and “-wrack.” In other words, if the poetry doesn’t give you something worth remembering, forget it.

When I think of Merwin’s line — as a poet this time — I hate it. I hate it because it’s so physical and memorable, so out of my league. Say the line aloud and all my blather about plosives and rhymes disappears; you’ll hear for yourself why it’s so good. I want to be able to do what he does in that line, to write like that. This brings me to the second response I hear when I tell people I’m a poet. If the first was apology, this is confession.

“Oh, I’ve written some poetry myself,” someone will say. And there’s the other secret. Everyone’s written poetry, even people who haven’t read much of it. Something — a poem in a textbook, a lullaby a mother sang, a pop song from adolescence — has moved them to imitation.

You hear those words in your head for years; you whisper them to yourself as a kind of prayer. Or you find that someone has managed to express feelings you recognize in yourself but couldn’t have articulated. And then you want to do it yourself, like kids playing air guitar or scratching imaginary turntables in bedrooms across the country.

Of course, not everyone has access to real guitars and turntables. And only the few geniuses among us take up instruments and create something recognizable as music on inspiration alone. Poetry requires no equipment. We can begin to experiment almost as soon as we have come into the English language. Think of the little brother in "A Christmas Story," rhyming over his dinner instead of eating it:

Meatloaf, smeatloaf,
Double-beatloaf,
I hate meatloaf.

I may not want that read to me on my deathbed, but I’m not about to say it’s not poetry.