Gateway poetry

Like most Americans, I was introduced to poetry in public school. And like many people, I didn't much care for it. To my recollection, nothing we read was younger than 300 years old, and the purpose of reading a poem seemed limited to just to finding out what was going on in the text. For years I thought of poems as just flowery riddles.

That is, until the summer of 1999. I lived in Los Angeles and commuted from Westwood to West Hollywood every day for an internship. Since I didn’t have a car, I had to take the bus; the trip took about two hours each way. I have a lot of fond memories of that summer, but few of that commute. In fact, only one.

I stayed out late most nights. Most mornings I was exhausted and despondent – all while surrounded by people like myself: residing in Los Angeles and unable to afford a car. Not a cheery lot. (There were the occasional European tourists, but they usually took one look at the ragged humanity that rides public transport in LA and quickly disembarked.)

But one morning I scanned the notices lining the walls of the bus and found one from some poetry awareness foundation. The ad featured the poem “Encounter” by Czeslaw Milosz. I wasn’t familiar with the poem or the poet, but the piece is so short it took less than a minute to read. And unlike what I was forced to appreciate in high school, this poem wasn’t opaque. It is profound, and becomes richer upon examination, but I felt a lump in my throat after only my first reading. That certainly didn’t happen with “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Reading “Encounter” on that bus instantly changed the way I thought of the form. It wasn’t dry and inscrutable – or at least, it didn’t need to be. I realized poetry could produce an emotional response. And realizing that, I began searching out more poems, discovering favorite pieces, authors, and journals. Later I did go back to the classics, and only then could I realize how incredible “Dover Beach” is.

The idea that young people are being introduced to poetry with the wrong poems is not radical or original. (Hollywood even made an overwrought movie about it.) But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. When I talk to teenagers about poetry they usually respond by making a face like they just bit into a lemon. And I don’t blame them. Shakespeare’s sonnets are awesome, but I don’t think it’s realistic to think the average highschooler will respond to them. Or at least I didn’t – not until I read Milosz first.