So... Why do you _read_ poems?

a big reason i keep reading poetry is because i want to improve my own writing of the craft. i think the more i read it, see different ways of doing something, different approaches, i keep defniing my own voice a little bit. improving my own writing. of course, it doesn't hurt that i also enjoy reading it and try to buy at least one poetry book for every 2 novels i buy - not a great ratio but good enough.

Janet Fitch wrote about (and I'm totally butchering her elegant quote) "The surprise that comes when one word wakes up next to another."

I'm an odd duck. I tend to downplay performance writing in literary novels, but love that aspect of poetry. The linguistic ju-jitsu, the magical, purposeful arrangement of words on a page--or spoken. That's why I enjoy poetry.

Because of their magical ability to transport me in ways no other medium can. I am color, shadow, light and fire when I read poetry. No other medium can claim that for me.

I read them for insight into the human condition, and a greater understanding of my own experience, as well as the experience of others.

I read poetry for epiphany.

I read them to take my breath away.

I read poetry for the chance to see language at its best. That sets standards for me and encourages me to keep broadening my skill set and refining my tools.

On their own words aren't always wondrous. But you know in your heart that they can be (that they have the potential for wonder), when mixed together with other words that are waiting to shine. I love to find a poem that brings out the best in the words used in the writing of the poem. Poetry brings words to beautiful life so much better than prose ever can (not that I have anything against prose...I love it just as much as I love poetry). Poetry, for me, is about glimpses. The poet has to paint a picture quite a bit faster than the prose writer does. It has to be complete on one canvas...whereas the prose writer has to do the same thing in a long series of canvases. Sometimes the reader doesn't have the time to invest in walking through an entire museum of canvases. Sometimes, they only have enough time to stand in front of one beautiful piece...to take in that one shining canvas in all its glory. I read poetry to get that full view that the beauty of chosen words can offer me...on one landscape, one canvas. A poet who can make the world more beautiful with a handful of words well chosen and well placed is worth more than gold. You read a well written poem and your heart lifts higher. It's a natural high...it's what you listen for in your workaday lives. Poetry is like a walk in the fall woods, when you hear a leaf hit the ground and you think, "My god! I'm here! I heard that leaf hit the ground!" And you look up at the blue sky, shown in glimpses through the fiery red canopy...and if you're lucky, you get to watch another leaf leave a tree and make its way down. "I'm alive!"

That's why I read poetry.


(thanks for the nod, Poet!)
(I love what Jamie said.)

While I have no problems spending hours on my own poetry or an excessively lengthy email, I often want to get to the point when reading what others have to say. Poetry does that. Short, sharp and concise but in such a way that I can impose my own values on the stimulation.

It may seem that I have no time for others and wish to inflict the full force of my wordiness upon them but I do have a heart. As this short post demonstrates, 90% of what I needed to say was written in the first paragraph. Secondary paragraphs or even secondary sentences within one paragraph are the full explanation to their introductions.

Reading poetry is favorable for the creative mind in that the essence of a poets idea is put forward from which I can build my own concept based on my own experiences or preferences. Occasionally it is great to be led step by step into an authors world with each minute detail spelled out in sparkling clarity. But when you cannot help visualizing the blond as a brunet or the staircase winding in the opposite direction, a novel can sometimes become an argument.

There is also an elegance to reading, ‘I saw a star’ as opposed to, ‘Through a 22” Vortex telescope I mapped and measured a class 4 binary pulsar in the Orion Nebular.”

Some days I like the fuzzy it’s over that way somewhere direction of poetry and other times I want the full blown encyclopedic version.

Colin Fiat.

... poems do more with less, and I've always been into that. Plus, poems don't come with stamped on meanings and instruction manuals. They are what they are: honest expressions of a writer's innermost emotions and thoughts.

It's cathartic for me-- both writing and reading poetry. The feeling is beautiful when you read a good poem, and think "Ah, yes...that is exactly how I'm feeling."

I read a couple of poems in the morning before starting my hectic day, and the good ones manage to get me through it. Without them, it would be so much harder. Poetry allows the writer and reader to connect in a way that nothing else can.

As KTC mentioned, the perfect combination of words to describe something is one of the most beautiful things in the world. It's the act of capturing a moment, thought or feeling so perfectly with such simplicity and brevity, which no piece of prose can which makes me love good poems so much.

Poetry is the music of ideas.

I've told this before, in other threads, but here goes. I spent the first 49 years of my life hating poetry. I suppose not the nursery rhymes Mom read us, but in junior high, senior high, and college I couldn't stand poetry. I tend to blame the way teachers taught it, but that's probably an unfair criticism.

When Dad died in 1997 I got all his books. Many of these were handed down through Mom from her great-uncle, and many were poetry: complete works of Shelly, Keats, Tennyson, Burns, and a few lesser known. One of the books was the letters of Charles Lamb, friend and colleague of Colleridge. I read those letters, fascinated by them and by the relationship between Lamb and Colleridge. So Lamb's letters led me to Colleridge; Colleridge led me to Wordsworth; Wordsworth led me to Keats, Tenneyson, Southy, etc., etc. And the end is not yet.

As to why I read poetry now, it is for a mixture of enjoyment and improving my own craft. In truth, most poetry tends to put me to sleep. I've been struggling through a Longfellow book, and can't read more than a page or two at a time. Shelley is a dark veil to me. Burns is close to indecipherable. Eliot is indecipherable. Most poetry written since 1900 leaves me flat, except for Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a few others. Tenneyson and Wordsworth are okay, but I couldn't read them for hours the way I can with prose.

But I keep reading. Times in Barnes & Noble are often a book of modern poetry and a tall house blend, hoping that it starts to gel for me. As to what turns me on about poetry--at least the poetry that I like--it's more the sound than anything else. I love the rhyming and meter, or the rhythm and word play. Metaphor and imagery make me think. Ambiguity that makes me think some about what the poet meant is a plus, but not utter obscurity.

As a teenager, I used to do it so I wouldn't look like a semi-literate metalhead who read nothing but science fiction. After a while I realized that all of the great old epics -- Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, the Divine Comedy, the Ramayana, Paradise Lost, Prometheus Unbound, etc. -- were all narrative poems, and that if I didn't grok them, it was because I didn't grok poetry.