It is embarrassing to admit I've spent most of my adult life reading, writing, and publishing poetry. Poets are overly emotional, silly, melodramatic. They are either junk addicts who write about crashing cars, or starry-eyed idealists who spend the day staring at a tree. Ferdinand the Bull was probably a poet. Some male poets I know work hard to make their poetry masculine. They do slam poetry, or they write about guns, whiskey and fist-fights. And poetry has no practical use. It doesn't show you how to use your Tevo, doesn't give life lessons like O Magazine, won't even offer one big universal truth like many classic novels. And poetry certainly won't make you any money. Even a Pulitzer Prize winning poet lives modestly.

If you want simple answers, poetry is not the place to look. If you like your language literal, poetry is not the place to look. If you like all your time to be productive, you may as well skip poetry. But if you want to be more present in the world and your body, if you want to rediscover your inner life, if you want to enjoy being alone or explore feelings our culture doesn't support, you may need poetry. If you are suffering from regret, unrelenting grief, love that threatens to crack you in two, you may need poetry. If you just want to remember why you are here on earth, rather than spending all the minutes of your day making money, cleaning, emailing, resenting your spouse, you absolutely need poetry, or art of some kind. Also, some folks wonder, what the hell IS poetry? And what is good poetry? Is poetry any nonsensical drivel you write down on a page and break-up into lines? (No, I'd answer.) There are even prose poems, and they don't have to be lineated, so really, WTF is poetry?

I would need a year or so and a few hundred pages to create an analytical definition of good poetry, but trying to pin it like a dead butterfly really isn't my purpose here. What I can say is that, like music, or dancing, or painting, poetry can bring you into your body in a new way. It can make you notice. It can make you feel awake. That is, if you're not already annoyed because you don't get it.

Here's an idea: There is no way to “get it.” But, you ask: Isn't all reading about trying to understand? In the case of reading poetry, I believe the answer to that question is no. In fact, trying to comprehend the poem the way you comprehend other writing is futile and frustrating, since its whole purpose is to make you feel language with your body, to illuminate gaps in our language. There are some things that words consistently fail: love, death, god. These are the places poetry tries to go, and, in doing so, stretches beyond the boundaries of conventional language use.

I'm also suggesting that people read poetry wrong, and that's why they hate it. Or, more accurately, I'm saying there is no wrong way to read poetry. So, you can tell that English teacher voice in your brain to shut-up, since there's no need to crack a poem like an egg. Look at it this way: You don't need to conquer the poem. In fact, in a great poem, there is more than one way to experience it. When I turn off my critic and soften my mind, I recognize a good poem the same way Emily Dickinson did, with a feeling like the top of my head is lifting-off. I'm not suggesting you don't read closely and carefully, or read the same poem again and again; I'm just saying you shouldn't drive yourself crazy trying to hunt it down and kill it.

So, the next time you have a need for poetry, as we tend to when we are heartbroken, grief-stricken or in love, try to let it wash over you. Let it seep in like water, clean you out. Don't try to make sense of it (stop making sense!) and just listen, just feel. Here's a poem I love, in case you want to try:

At Thirty
by Lynda Hull

Whole years I knew only nights: automats
& damp streets, the Lower East Side steep

with narrow rooms where sleepers turn beneath
alien skies. I ran when doorways spoke

rife with smoke & zippers. But it was only the heart's
racketing flywheel stuttering I want, I want

until exhaustion, until I was a guest in the yoke
of my body by the last margin of land where the river

mingles with the sea & far off daylight whitens,
a rending & yielding I must kneel before, as

barges loose glittering mineral freight
& behind me façades gleam with pigeons

folding iridescent wings. Their voices echo
in my voice naming what is lost, what remains.