I fell in love with poetry during my freshman year of high school. I was a struggling student who came off a rough time in middle school after the school district changed our program and refused to grandfather us out of classes we had already taken. I was bored, got myself into trouble, and was eventually home schooled for the entire second semester of my 8th grade year.

My freshman English teacher was new to the school and fresh out of his masters program. This was his first time teaching his own class, and he approached it with a vigor I’d never experienced in my life. He was engaging, exciting, and could actually connect with us… so when he decided to make the poetry section extra long, no one sighed or groaned, we were just happy to have him as our teacher.

That poetry section lit a fire in me I’ve never been able to explain. Now that I’m older and able to self-reflect a bit, I think it comes down to how I learned english… which was by feeling it out. My mother was an English professor and dad, while mostly a math and engineering guy, had a solid grasp of the importance of good writing. So, my brother and I were forced into summer reading programs from a very early age, and while he took to it with fervor, I struggled to sit still or find anything that caught my attention. Still, it was time in front of words, and my subconscious picked up something; I couldn’t explain grammar to you, even to this day, but I know what’s right or wrong just by reading/speaking it. Poetry took advantage of that brain plasticity and pushed me to exploit it.

During four years in high school, I filled three 1.5” binders with poetry that is the very definition of a awful, terrible, teenage poem. It’s the kind of stuff that ought to be burned before ever finding its way in front of human eyes again. But I enjoyed it, and was slowly getting better; the problem was that I spent more time writing than reading, so my exposure to the wider world of poems was very small. I thought I liked Dickinson, Shakespeare, Poe, and Frost… partly because that’s all I knew to buy from our tiny malls Walden Books in 2004… but I rarely connected to them in a real way and didn’t use anything I read in my own work.

I went off to college fresh faced and determined to become a poet, planning to be a Creative Writing major despite what I told anyone else. But my literature classes didn’t go well, and my writing classes gifted me with a new internal editor voice more harsh than anything I’d ever heard. For the next decade I shut down almost completely and barely wrote anything out of fear of it being awful.

Perhaps you’re wondering when I’ll get to the point, so let me cut you off and say it’s right now, if you’d stop interrupting… the problem is that poetry is the easiest writing in the world to finish and send out to the world. There are general rules around what it is, some forms with structure and some without, but in one short sitting you can crank something out and send it off to others. In my day it was poetry forums and FictionPress. Today, it’s social networks like Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram… many times it’s typed over a moody image or made to look like it was written with a typewriter or inked with a nib. But the bar to completion is fairly low, and because of that, lots of people try it out without experience reading, editing, or revising.

A haiku, for instance, is three short lines made up of a handful of syllables. If you’re following more traditional rules, it should be about nature, the seasons, or the mundanity of life; it’s observational and metaphorical without trying too hard. Haiku are often playful, using words as puns and messing with your expectations. But if you search online for #haiku, you rarely find a combination of what’s described above… instead, it’s a boring slog of wannabe haiku coming from their mind instead of experience. They know its supposed to be about nature, so they imagine a mountain or lake without actually going, and the picture they paint is like a grandmother’s drawing of your favorite Pokémon based only on you describing it to her.

Longer forms of writing have a higher barrier to entry, so teenagers aren’t sitting there long enough to crank out whole novels to push on their friends. But poems are short and seemingly easy and if you’re not reading much yourself, anything you write can sound good when you lovingly read it to a significant other.

But the other problem poetry’s reputation has to contend with, is the lack of understanding by the general public of why it’s important. My personal take on this is two-fold. The first, easiest answer is that we place more importance on things that are not just harder to accomplish, but harder to consume as well. Heady documentaries are considered more beneficial than a mind-blowing blockbuster. Classical and Jazz are somehow more intellectual or impressive than punk or hip-hop. Oil or Acrylic painting is given more artistic importance than an artist with an iPad and Apple Pencil. In the same way, a novel is given weight that a chapbook can’t compare to. It’s a form of meritocracy, where the longer and harder we think someone worked (or that we had to work to consume it), the more merit their work must have… which is not only wrong, but stupid if you ask me.

My second take is that poetry is hard to read on purpose. Its line breaks and word choices are off-beat and confusing; the punctuation doesn’t determine where thoughts start or stop, or even where breaths should happen; they are packed full of metaphor and allegory that hits everyone differently, so your reading and mine can be very different (while each being valid); and perhaps most frustrating of all, is that poets often can’t/won’t explain what things mean in a clear and coherent way. Poems are opaque on purpose and society teaches us to value clarity instead.

So, what’s a good poem? How do you learn to read them without banging your head through a desk? Who do you start with? These are unanswerable in a generic or universal way because we are each so different, but for me there are a few I can list without reservation.

The first poet I fell in love with was Frank O’Hara; his collection “Lunch Poems” is a favorite, and I often carry it with me, stealing a chance to read one here or there throughout my day. Sarah Kay’s collection “No Matter the Wreckage” often brings me to tears; I have been slowly reading it for the better part of a year, but keep rereading the same poems over and over again instead of making forward progress. Joshua Beckman’s “The Inside of an Apple” contains some of the most beautifully assembled words I’ve ever seen on a page. Terrance Haye’s “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin” broke my heart so many times, while also finding room to make me laugh until my belly hurt. Matthew Zapruder’s latest, “Father’s Day,” connects with me in ways I didn’t know possible.

You may read some of the above and not get what I love about them, but that’s the beauty of poems! We are different people, who like different movies, books, music, and people… of course our taste in poets will be different.

But if you choose to start reading poetry, promise me you’ll take it slow, do some research, make sure you buy a book that’s a good fit for you, maybe visit the library first and take a few out on loan. Once they’re in your hands, read slowly and out loud to yourself. Hear the words you’re saying, how they interact with each other, and enjoy the wordplay at work. Listen for assonance and alliteration, admire a words repetition, revel in the simile and metaphor. Learn to look for analogies and references. When it pays off, poetry is the most magical thing in the world. And while you could sit and read or write a poem in a matter of minutes, don’t.

Take your time, read it several times, let it wash over you. Poems are a bath, not a shower; you save water not by speeding through it, but by taking your time, relaxing, and enjoying the experience.

Now get out there and start reading. Happy National Poetry Month.