There has been an interesting discussion going on in different blogs about poetry accessibility and whether or not poetry should be, in Billy Collins’ phrasing, “welcoming” or not. One blogger argued for difficulty in poetry, saying that poetry isn’t meant for “the masses” and that’s okay, and that one shouldn’t try to commodotize poetry, etc. I often hear this argument from poets whose poetry is difficult and experimental. The other argument, from those in the New Formalist camp, is that the masses want rhyming, metrical verse – and that most readers aren’t even aware of poetry written after 1950, because free verse has somehow turned them away from poetry.

Since I like to express opinions that make me unpopular, I’ll just say that neither of these arguments holds water for me. Why should poetry force people to climb a barbed wire fence? I am a poet, and spent time and money to study poetry, and I still won’t willingly read a book that gives me a headache. Well, maybe once, to see what the hoopla is all about. And I just don’t believe that people are staying away from poetry simply because they don’t like free verse. I know that if all I knew of poetry was the Tennyson, Keats, etc they taught us in grade school, I wouldn’t ever have picked up a poetry book voluntarily. Free verse can be done wonderfully, and anyone who doesn’t believe me should pick up something by Rita Dove, or Louise Gluck, or James Tate, or any poetry anthology that includes writers born after 1920. I think the reason most people stay away in droves from poetry is because a. they didn’t like the poetry (Tennsyon, Keats, et al) they learned in high school, b. they once went to a poetry reading that frightened them, or c. they simply think poetry is irrelevant. If they want to read, they read a historical novel, or crime fiction, not poetry.

I like to think of myself as a populist, and I try to write poetry that an average person could pick up and understand. However, I’ve been told (by both editors and friends) that a lot of my poetry contains too many references (to mythology, folk stories, etc) to be considered widely accessible. I’m certainly not referring to things in order to keep people out of my poems, but I guess it could have that effect. Is my poetry difficult? I don’t think so. But it does assume that a person either knows or might bother to look up a character, for instance, like Persephone, or Cinderella. Harumph. So am I a big hypocrite? I’m capable to writing direct poems that don’t include references, of course. And I know those poems might have a wider audience. But I only write those poems about 20 percent of the time.

I think there is space in the poetry world for difficult, experimental poetry, there is space for formal poetry, there’s space for every school out there. A book that might seem flat and dull to one reader might be exactly the thing another reader loves. I know as a reviewer that I don’t love everything I read – but when I review, I try to keep my mind open to the fact that other readers’ tastes might be different than mine. So I might say something like, “While this challenging work leans to the elliptical” which is code for “I don’t really feel like putting any more effort into what seems like self-aggrandizing pretentious nonsense, but I know that some people really get into this kind of thing.”

My family is full of intelligent people without MFAs who might actually read poetry for fun, so I like to ask them questions about poetry. They do things like research robotics, train corporate clones, program web sites, troubleshoot telecom networking, run medical scanning tests. My grandmother worked on a farm her whole life and retired with nothing more than a GED (which she completed by eighth grade) – but is more well-read than some of my professors have been, and can quote the Bible, Dante, and Coleridge by heart. These are people that work long hours, and want to be rewarded for their effort when they read. They don’t care about what school of poetry someone comes from, but they want to read something that grabs them, that moves them, that might take them from the familiar to the unexpected. They want someone who talks like they do, not with a lot of “fancy bullshit.” (Hey, my family has working class roots. Wanna make something of it?) I don’t necessarily always write the kind of poetry my family might want to read were I not related to them, but I hope that sometimes I do.

In the meantime, I like to read poetry that is mentally challenging, but not willfully obscure. Is that line hard to draw? Sometimes. Can poetry matter? Of course. It’s not like we poets should give up and say, well, no one’s ever going to read this anyway, so why bother trying?

To sum up in a jumble of pop culture references:

The audience is out there.

If we build the right poem, they will come.