Poetry is like coconut to students. They firmly believe they don’t like it.

Richard Tillinghast says this attitude is our own fault. That we’ve made poetry out to be for the superliterate. We tell them it is more complex that it seems, that to quote Whitman it “contains multitudes.” To read poetry requires you to have read Dickens and Joyce. Or at least this is the culture we’ve created. During the interview he gave earlier this fall at the University of Memphis, he essentially told us to knock it off and encouraged us to read a poem everyday. Because what is more consumable in our fast-paced, multi-tasking world than a poem.

I took his advice to heart and have been starting most of my mornings with a poem. I do what I’ve not allowed myself to do since I was in high school–I jump around, skimming and looking for poems that catch me, catch my mood. Which means I’m mostly reading contemporary poets. I like poetry foundation–where I can type is a word like “rain” and get all their poems that contain that word. I like poems by women. I don’t like poems that set up an elaborate specific situation–either historical or imagined. I like poems that are full of marvelous turns of phrases or that redefine an abstract concept.

Sometimes I post parts of them as my status update and try not to worry that it makes me seem high-faluting or showy. I post them because they made me cry, or smile, or laugh, or inspired me to write a paragraph of my own. I am letting myself feel about poetry like I did when I was young enough to write an entire graduation speech about “The Road Not Taken” only to realize several years later that I’d never truly understood what Frost wanted me to about the two roads in a yellow wood. The woman who taught me that went on to win a Pulitzer for her own poetry, thus teaching me that first-year composition teachers are highly undervalued.

For a while, back in college, I fancied myself a poet. I became unholy fascinated by Sylvia Plath and started down my own path of intensely autobiographical poetry that was for all intents and purposes intensely bad. Not as bad as the bunkum I wrote in my high school diary, but of the same spirit. But it introduced me to a wonderful teacher, Heather Ross Miller, who is a tremendous writer with novels and poetry and stories. And deep down in my practical heart I decided it would be okay to pursue writing someday.

I hope you read poetry.