
How I Overcame My Fear of Reading Contemporary Poets
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When I was a prospective student visiting the creative writing department at my now alma mater, an upperclassman asked me who my favorite poet was. I said Emily Dickinson. He asked if I had any favorite contemporary poets, but I couldn’t name one—I didn’t read contemporary poetry. I thought free verse was nothing but arbitrary line breaks in formless drabbles that were also so esoteric and inaccessible that I couldn’t possibly be expected to understand or enjoy them.
Seven years later, I not only have several favorite contemporary poets, but poetry collections make up nearly 20 percent of the books I read. Here’s how that happened.
- Don’t let Word automatically capitalize your lines for you—make all your capitalization intentional.
- Don’t waste the ends of your lines on weak words.
- Use your line breaks to create emphasis, to surprise your reader, to suggest alternate interpretations.
***
The next semester, the upperclassman from my first visit chose one of my poems for publication in our school’s literary journal. After that, poetry began sneaking into my life again. I’d be journaling, like any devout fan of Joan Didion or David Sedaris, and occasionally my pen would slip thoughts into stanzas. Terrible, cliché poems never to see the light of day, of course, but I was flexing the muscle. Experimenting with how form could add shades of meaning to language. Guest poets would visit and give seminars and readings. I’d print my most palatable poems for their workshops, begrudging the fact that poetry was easier to critique in such a group than prose. The poets—Catherine Pierce, Jeanine Hathaway, and others—spouted pithy wisdom in these meetings that stayed with me, though. “Pretend each word in a poem has to pay to be there,” said one poet. “Trust that your reader is smarter than you,” said another. “Nobody wants their hand held.” One named honesty as a key principle in his aesthetic philosophy: “Once I get a whiff of pretense, I’m out.” All of this advice proved useful for my prose, and eventually I began attending the workshops without grudge. I’d sit in the audience at their readings, listening to the cadence of their words, and wish I had their poems in hard copy so I could follow along and see their line breaks.***
Dr. Smith always insisted that poetry was a crucial part of a writer’s diet. “Everyone should read at least one poem every day,” he said. “I always keep a collection on my bedside table for easy access.” Never gonna happen, I thought. Yet while perusing the stacks of my college library one day, my gaze stuck on a copy of Come on All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder. Intrigued by the title, I flipped it open. Instead of finding the poems esoteric and inaccessible, I got chills. This stanza from “The Prelude” hit me hard:***
Senior year, I signed up for Dr. Smith’s advanced poetry workshop and arrived on the first day with an audit form in hand. “Not risking my honors status on the strength of my poetry,” I told him. He signed my form, delighted I’d come around to poetry at last. Part of the class was reading fifty contemporary poems and writing a response to each one. “You can write as much or as little as you want,” he said. “Copy down lines you liked, comment on word choice, note any poetic devices used, describe the feeling the poem evoked—or failed to evoke!—when you read it.” Through this exercise, I finally began to understand Dr. Smith’s philosophy that poetry should be part of a well-rounded literary diet. These fifty poems helped me understand my aesthetic sense, but they also made me feel something. The ending of Diane Seuss’s “Jesus, with his cup” left me with another kind of unnameable feeling: “Even the mayor’s wife sipping from a teacup / wreathed in Banded Peacock butterflies wonders, in her loneliness, / why me? Why this cup?” I caved and decided to try the Poem-A-Day diet as provided by an email subscription through the Academy of American Poets. Admittedly some poems felt esoteric and inaccessible, reinforcing my early fears about reading contemporary poets. But others I liked, and some I even loved. Poetry became the bulk of my literary intake when I moved to Spain to teach English; I had limited access to English books in my local library, but every day I had a poem in my inbox. Every day I read them on my bus ride home through the Basque countryside. It became a meditative ritual, a restorative literary snack after a hectic day of teaching. During this time I encountered “Heavy” by Hieu Minh Nguyen. “I think the life I want // is the life I have, but how can I be sure?” it reads. Far from home on an expat year full to bursting with loneliness and adventure, those words resonated deeply.***
For more poems that fulfill (and expand on!) this set of aesthetic principles, check out this post on the 15 stanzas that made me fall in love with contemporary poetry.