How to Fall in Love With Poetry

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A literary agent requested the full manuscript of Lightning Strikes! This agent told me it would take six to eight weeks for me to hear back, which puts the response window at the end of May/beginning of June. Please keep your fingers crossed!

I also received a really nice rejection. The email read, “You have an interesting story to tell and there’s a lot to like about your approach.”

So I’ve been feeling all sorts of confident lately. At 34-years-old, I’m wearing a two-piece bathing suit for the first time in my life. And I colored my hair. Generally, a woman changes her hair to signal a breakdown or a breakthrough. I think this might be a breakthrough.

National Poetry Month

I decided to channel some of my newfound confidence in getting one of my favorite friends to like poetry. My Favorite Friend told me that they didn’t understand poetry and I couldn’t believe it because My Favorite Friend is one of the most intelligent, empathetic, and emotionally intelligent people I have the privilege of knowing.

I told her so, and she acquiesced to maybe being into some “angsty” poetry.

Despite reading and heavily annotating Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (which I mentioned last week), the best I could do was Google “angsty poetry.” And that brought me to this poem by Amy Key:

I disowned my real pain & engaged with its subordinates:

despicable neediness, heroic guilt and undeterrable envy. Each day

I woke trussed up with this hernia of failure, bleat bleat.

There was inevitable blood; I slept on a pyre of bottles. Stalked

by motherhood, unable to summon my latent powers. Leaves

blew into the hallway and did their ageing there, the eager wind

fussed with them like the beaded fringe of a shawl at war with itself.

Powerful identification with the leaves. In the garden, splendour

made its entrance while I wasn’t looking. I was quaking

all this time, my whole body a throat stoppered by tears. I tried

to will dreams of romantic redemption, but my brain swatted

them away, like flies gunning for something you really want to eat.

My Favorite Friend’s Response: I don’t get it… my eyes glazed over about 3 lines in but my brain kept reading and before I knew it, the poem was over. The only thing I’ll remember about this poem is “bleat bleat” which may have to be a part of my every day vocabulary. I liked the fly imagery though… 

I have to give My Favorite Friend credit. They knew enough to pay attention to diction (also known as word choice), which is a fundamental poetic device. And they connected with the fly imagery.

But they didn’t fall in love with the poem. So maybe my newfound confidence doesn’t extend to facilitating a love affair with poetry.

Where did I go wrong?

According to Hirsch, “Reading poetry is a way of connecting–through the medium of language–more deeply with yourself even you connect more deeply with another,” meaning the writer. Poetry has to be personal. And why did I listen to My Favorite Friend about their supposed preferred theme when they don’t even read poetry?

Hirsch also says, “The reader completes the poem, in the process bringing to it his or her own past experiences.” So the question really becomes: do I know my friend well enough to send the right poem?

I think I do. I’ll let you know how round two goes.

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