I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

I love poetry. Of course I do. I'm hosting the show every weekday. And you're here listening.

So I think we have this love of poetry in common. But I also know people who are a little uneasy with poetry.

I've met plenty of people who've confessed to me,

I love to read, but I don't get poetry.

Or they might simply say, I'm not a poetry person.

Believe it or not, I understand. I think most of us grow up telling stories and

reading stories, so narrative becomes second nature, but somehow poetry feels trickier,

more difficult, more challenging, less accessible. I think this may be in part because

of how we first encounter poetry. We may have learned nursery rhymes as small children,

and we may have read Shell Silverstein or other fun poems in elementary school, but our first formal

education in poetry is often high school. In many schools, this still entails reading poems from

the canon, the classics, and explicating them. Discussing the literary devices used by the classics, and explicating them,

discussing the literary devices used by the authors and explaining what the poems mean.

Listen, I love poetry, and I'll be honest,

that wouldn't have excited Teenage Me.

Teenage Me wanted to read Sylvia Plath and Nikki Giovanni and Donald Hall and Charles Simic. I wanted to read those poems and highlight

my favorite lines the way I would do with my favorite songs.

Sometimes I wish we could engage with poetry the way we engage with music.

When I listen to a song or a record, I'm not trying to figure out what it means.

I'm not preparing an argument or gathering evidence. I'm not doing a post-mortem on techniques. I'm having a pleasurable experience with someone else's art, letting the sounds wash over me and gleaning what I can from it. Maybe a lyric jumps out at me, maybe a melody or harmony, maybe some instrumentation. My point is that I can love a song

without fully getting it.

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