You love poetry. You may not know it yet, but you do. I know how difficult poetry can be. It can ask you to figure it out, give you all sorts of signals and then say, “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” Poetry has made you think you didn’t understand it. I’m telling you — you do. And the confusion isn’t poetry’s fault, or your fault. It’s our fault.

I mean those of us who have taught poetry, from the university level to high school and all the way down. Most kindergarteners love poetry because the sounds of the words delight them. They even learn the alphabet by learning to recite a poem that almost anyone reading this can still remember. But too many high school graduates have given up on the poetry in their textbooks because we’ve taught them that those poems are riddles to be solved instead of something to be enjoyed. No wonder rock‘n’roll and hip hop speak to teenagers in ways adults fail to understand. No one’s asking them to figure out the hidden meaning of their iPod playlists.

This isn’t to say there’s not a great deal to be gained by studying poetry closely, even by paying obsessive attention to its nuances. I wouldn’t be in a graduate program in English if I didn’t think that were true. But the point is pleasure. We don’t read poetry because we like to solve puzzles; that’s what Rubik’s Cubes and Sudoku and “Lost” are for. We read poetry because it delights us, and helps us make sense of our lives — just like movies and songs, the stories you read and those you tell about each other.

But what if poetry doesn’t delight you? What if it just seems too difficult? My bet is that when many people think of poetry, they think of something like this:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness

or, just as heavy,

He holds him with his skinny hand,
“There was a ship,” quoth he.
“Hold off! unhand me, greybeard loon!”
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

These are great poems, yes, but they’re both about 200 years old. The former is the first line of John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), the latter an early stanza of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798).

When was the last time you called your boyfriend “thou”? Or said, “I’m so stressed, I’ve got a midterm eftsoons and my prof quothed I needed to get an A on it.” The language of these poems is not the language we speak (or even read) today, and so they seem difficult even before we begin to wonder about “meaning.” We can admire these poems and enjoy them, but they fit our contemporary English about as naturally as we fit in bonnets and cravats.

So what does poetry look like today? Let me use the words of one of my own teachers, Charles Wright, a poet who has said, “Poetry either maximizes the differences between the written word and the spoken word or it minimizes that difference.” Let’s look at the second such example in a poem by Mark Halliday, a 50-something poet who teaches at Ohio University:

“Family”

The family drove from Colorado to Pasadena
for Christmas, and Bev unwrapped two games
to give to the boys during the trip,
because she wanted the boys to be happy—
she brought out the games in a motel in Utah—
and thirty-two years later,
thirteen years after Bev’s death,
Hal for some reason remembers the motel in Utah
(while making a wry point about motels, or Utah, or Christmas)
and begins to speak of that evening—
and then at the phrase “to keep the boys happy”
he suddenly has to stop and look away.

The poem is almost deceptively simple. In fact, some might think it’s nothing more than chopped-up prose. But prose is usually used either to convey information or to develop plot and character. Look at the last image, where “he suddenly has to stop and look away.” Prose would have told you Hal started to cry, or told you more about this relationship.