We know, we know, you’re tired of hearing about National Poetry Month. We’re eleven days in already; folks should just give it a rest with all the recaps, thinkpieces, and thoughtful critiques of the hot, new poems. It’s genuinely a little nauseating that we can’t hop online or walk down the street without running into a sestina or, worse, staring down another damn villanelle. We all know, anyways, that National Poetry Month is just the result of BIG STANZA lobbyists petitioning legislators for an even stronger stranglehold on the North American cultural zeitgeist. National Poetry Month? We too dislike it.
After all, every month is so stuffed with poetry already. All those advertisements you hear on Spotify or the radio or whatever. “What do you do, what do you do about love’s austere and lonely offices?,” we hear those awful Staples ads ask constantly. OK, fine, we’ll buy a nice wall calendar already! Or those commercials for antidepressants that play on YouTube? The worst. “Here, vain deluding joys / The brood of Folly without father bred” etc. etc. You know how it goes. We especially can’t believe that the city approved all those billboards along the highway. “You can rest. / You can be content / Now that there is / That odor in the world.” We get it, Louise, you’ve got a new mock orange fragrance on the market. Enough.
You, like us, probably try to find a way to celebrate poetry in your own private way despite the oversaturation.
You wander lonely as a cloud, but tell no one. You try to give the red wheelbarrow a break, dry it off, move it away from the white chickens. You compare intemperate and unlovely things to summer days. You admit that you’re (at best) moderately cool and more of a Jazz July really. You go to the goblin market in the mid-afternoon and avoid all the obnoxious crying of mornings and evenings. You don’t look on his works despite being mighty and definitely don’t despair (who has the time?). You dare disturb the universe. You check in on the angelheaded hipsters, invite them out for a meal, lend them some of your old clothes. You dig up that jar some dude thoughtlessly placed in Tennessee. You suss out a way to make a dream deferred both sag and explode. You mark everything but that flea. You tighten the gyre, take the falcon to the vet. You stop for death because you’re sick of being called standoffish.
And while you, like everyone we know, are thoroughly sonnet-pilled and poet-coded, we sometimes wonder what it might be like to meet someone - maybe in a station of the metro or on that road no one takes - who somehow doesn’t know much about poetry or often just avoids it. True, it’s almost unimaginable that such a person could exist - but what, we wonder, would we tell the soft animal of their body about poetry had we but world enough and time?
First, we’d probably have to let them know that you can find poetry all over the internet for free. The Poetry Foundation, Poets.org, The Poetry Archive, and Penn Sound have an incredible amount of famous and unfamous poetry by famous and unfamous poets! They seem too to have forgotten to put up paywalls! It’s wild. They also, insanely, don’t install cookies or force you to agree to have them install cookies on your phone or whatever. It’s like they haven’t heard the saying: “Paywalls and cookies, cookies paywalls, that is all ye know online and all ye need to know.” So, nearly endless poetry is available everywhere for no cost (for now!!).
Don’t trust free stuff? That’s fine, too! It’s a rare act, but one can totally pay for poems! A lot of bookstores don’t stock poetry because of how popular it is, but a few bookstores (sellouts!) cater to the masses and have a poetry section. It’s not, like, obvious, though. To deter thieves, they play this neat game where they hide the section in the most awkward place possible. The bookstore employees might even say things like “We don’t have that” or “What?” when you ask where the poetry section is, but that’s just part of their anti-theft training. If you listen closely, you can usually follow the faint, melancholy sound of a lyre and it’ll lead you right to the poetry books! Now, the section might appear neglected, disorganized, poorly stocked, and also weirdly full of quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore (e.g. Rupi Kaur books, Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, Volume 2 of The Divine Comedy) - but it exists and you can browse it for as long as you like undisturbed because chances are good that no one else will happen across it that day!
Oh, the problem isn’t access? The problem is that it’s so obvious who the right poets are to read? They’re so well-publicized and accessible! Well, have no fear! As it happens, you can just dip into and out of any old or young poet’s work! No obligation! No subscriptions or anything! You can just read a poem and see if you like what it’s up to. Kind of like you’d listen to a song. It’s a weird comparison - poetry and music - but bear with us. See, just as there are no songs or musicians you have to listen to or like, so too are there no poems or poets you have to read or enjoy. We, personally, find Byron horrible! It’s true! And the good taste police are so overworked they’ll probably never even catch up with us! You can just treat poetry like literally everything! It’s really only as special or trivial as you make it!
Oh, enjoyment is the problem? Poetry is too enjoyable immediately? The problem is that when you read the poem it seems like it’s all too obvious and clear what they’re talking about and why? You read a poem and you “just get it” before you even reach the end? Yeah, we know all about that. Like, when Ashbery writes about an “Undetermined summer thing eaten / By grief and passage” we know he’s talking about, well, you know. Duh. Or what Dove is getting at in “Adolescence-II”? So straightforward. Too straightforward, you might say.
It’s a common complaint that poetry is too inviting, too easy to be enjoyed on the regular. We found, though, that if you force yourself to scrutinize every word as closely as possible and suffer, then you can get some real pleasure out of it. As long as you treat it like an intellectual exercise and slap yourself any time you drift into feeling, poetry can be great fun. All those people who read poems like they look at paintings, let the words loosely guide them as figures or colors guide an eye, are doing it very wrong. The readers who sit and let a poem stay unresolved, let it keep a part or most of its mystery undisclosed, are having a bad time (despite the lies they might tell).
The problem isn’t any of that? It’s not even a problem of familiarity! You hate poetry?? Because of how practical it is? How much influence it has on the world? Sadly we’ve heard folks say similar things before. Not for nothing, Auden famously said “Poetry makes something happen! Wowza!! Look out, world!!! Poetry’s gonna get ya!” The trick, such as it is, is to set aside how practical it is for a moment. Poems tend to be short and even long ones rarely that long, so you can almost totally set aside the nagging suspicion that you should be doing something impractical or useless with your time while reading them. For half a minute, you can bracket the ideological imperative to waste every second of your life in the pursuit of naught but feeling, thought, and gratitude for all the ways our lives make and do not make sense.
That might be all we’d say to this imaginary person who doesn’t care for poetry. It’s not like we’ve given it much thought. Rare that a day goes by, as you know, without a poet trending on Twitter or some lines of verse repeated ad nauseum on TikTok. And they’re all so wealthy, these poets. They get all this attention, all this validation, all this money - and for what? For making attempts to describe what it means or how it is to pay attention to a life or a world for a little while? Can’t believe the economy is set up to reward endeavors like that. You’d think folks would prefer to lose their money to crypto scams or petroleum futures, pay constant half-attention to politicians and memes. Imagine that world! A place where schools taught poetry horribly or not at all! Where people shied away from a beautiful if obtuse mode of expression or description. Yikes. No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief and so on. You get it.
Oh, but you were just stopping by find out about some poets in Montreal? Didn’t need the snarky preamble? Say no more. There are a bunch of great poets in and/or from this city and not a single one of them is or was ever named Leonard. Here are just three that come to mind immediately:
The free verse militias roaming the streets are particularly worrisome.
Yikes/oof/feelings 😭 😶🌫️🫥🤡🕳️💀🤺 can't find an emoji for poetry/bong!