How to Kill a Poet

Stop writing about the Death of Poetry. Poetry doesn’t die; poets do. A case study. Or a memoir.

Killing a poet isn’t all that difficult. There are ways to kill a poet that are just like killing anyone else, but a poet has certain qualities unique to them. First and foremost, they write poems. (Poetry, regardless of quality or form, is the main evidence that are you are dealing with a poet.) Often they are good at paying attention to their environments, and they seem particularly talented at using language to describe the world. Perhaps they may be melancholic to the point of being suicidal. There is such a thing as the Sylvia Plath effect, after all. However, the death I am talking about isn’t so much about corporeal mortality.

For decades literary critics have spilled rivers — nay, oceans! — of ink over the supposed Death of Poetry. One could point to Dana Gioia’s (in)famous 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” as the delivery of a stage 4 diagnosis requiring urgent treatment. Since then we have had everything from concerned check-ups from

Micah Mattix

to outright obituaries (I’m looking at you, Matthew Walther.)¹. There have been countless second opinions. James Matthew Wilson had this rejoinder to Walther’s pronouncement of death as well as a whole book, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking, which relays his own prognosis and intervention.

I can’t help but think of Monty Python at this moment.

But poetry isn’t dying. It’s been around for millennia and has proven itself to be very hardy. There is more poetry written and shared now than ever and much of it is free, on demand, and in the palms of everyone’s hands at the tap of a button. Social media gave rise to lucrative Instapoets, most notably Rupi Kaur, and made it possible for poems to “go viral” as was the case when Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” raced through the internet after the 2016 Orlando shootings at the Pulse nightclub and when Kitty O’Meara became the unofficial “poet laureate of the pandemic” in 2020 with her prose poem “And the people stayed home…”. A generation of poetry lovers is being inspired by young people like Amanda Gorman who delivered the inaugural poem in 2021. Poetry seems to be public and popular… but is it any good?

Some critics complain that many of these trendy poems are just the foam of mediocrity atop a sea of refuse. However, there is no denying that there are extremely good poems being written (and translated) today. Are they particularly hard to find? No. There are a number of journals that regularly publish excellent poetry because they have editors with a fine aesthetic sense, such as The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, 32 Poems, and many more. And promising online journals like

New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry

are being created as more traditional publications like The Gettysburg Review are shutting down due to economic pressure.

I don’t think poetry is dying. I think it is diversifying, and even the traditional metrical forms that once seemed endangered have come back from the brink. The MFA program in Poetry at the University of St. Thomas in Houston² is thriving even though it focuses exclusively on writing in metrical verse, and formal poets like A.E. Stallings have succeeded in reaching the heights of poetic acclaim as demonstrated when she was named the University of Oxford's 47th Professor of Poetry in 2023.

Poets are born as soon as they encounter the world around them and express how they feel through metaphorical language. Are they good poets? No, everyone starts by writing bad poetry. However, yelling at poets to write better poetry isn’t going to make better poetry. Telling someone they are doing something wrong all the time isn’t motivating. It’s time to stop telling everyone that poetry is dead, and we are drowning in bad poetry. We are overthinking the problem.

What do I mean? It is time to consider an actual case study, a detailed report of an individual patient: me. I never should have become a poet. No one around me loved poetry. Not my parents, not even my English teachers. I knew no living poets. I thought they went extinct at around the time that Robert Frost died. Even worse, my education made me hate poetry. It made me feel stupid, and no teacher could ever teach me why poetry mattered.

And yet here I am. Resurrected as a poet.

Case Study: Patient #1

Profile of a Young Student

I am a first generation Filipino-American who was born and raised outside of Boston. My parents came to the United States in the 1960s as working professionals. My father was a mechanical engineer, and my mother was a medical lab technician. Believing in the American dream, they worked very hard and eventually became naturalized citizens. They sent me to Catholic school from kindergarten to my senior year in high school, and then I went off to college and received my Bachelors degree in Literature in 1996. Paying for my education was the greatest gift my parents ever gave me (other than my life), and I can never thank them enough. I say this despite the fact that hated school.

My parents were always too busy to read to us when my sister and I were little. We didn’t have many books other than a World Book Encyclopedia which I read when there was nothing on television. Although she didn’t spend money on books, my mother loved music and paid for piano and voice lessons even though it was a huge financial sacrifice for the family. Since I had no close friends as a child, I would bring a Sony Walkman to school and eat my lunch alone while listening to the same mixed cassette of classical music. That Walkman was my best friend for years.

When I was in school the only poetry I read was for assignments. I was forced to memorize poetry, mostly Shakespeare. I enjoyed absolutely none of the poetry I encountered during my primary and secondary education. I heard no poetry outside of school and church.

And then I went to college. That’s when it all went to hell. If my early education starved the poet in me, my college education should have killed her off completely.

The English Major and the Poetry Prof

Despite not liking school, I went to college because I knew that was my ticket to a better life. At first, I was a pre-med because doctors are successful people, and I wanted to be a successful person. Lo and behold, I was not good at science. Needing to switch my major to something I could pass I realized that I had taken enough literature courses to continue on an English major track without penalty. I may not have been good at chemistry, but I was good at reading, writing, and talking about books.

This new major required me to take several poetry classes. The English department was a small one, and there were two professors who taught poetry exclusively. I only remember one of the classes because of the trauma it induced, led by a young woman who had already made her name as a scholar. One of the assignments for the course was to bring in a poem on our appointed evening so that we could all discuss it in class. When one of my friends had her turn, she brought in a well loved personal copy of a collection by Kahlil Gibran. She read aloud from the book, and when my friend was done the professor said that it was a terrible poem and that she would have been better off picking out something by Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman. Understandably, my friend broke down in tears. From that night, I resolved to not like this professor for the duration of my education at this university. Unfortunately for me, since there were few professors in the department and a certain number of required courses, I was forced to take her again.

One night my professor went off script. She spent more than half the class time railing about an essay called “Can Poetry Matter?” by a man named

Dana Gioia

. As she worked herself into a tizzy over the criticism that academia was hurting poetry I decided to read everything written by this man. Why? Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Little did I know what this resolution was going to mean decades later. I read Gioia, but without love for poetry. I read more of his criticism than his poems, in an effort to understand and analyze rather than to experience the joy of language. My heart was hardened against poetry.

Later my junior year I had to see this professor during her office hours. At some point the professor asked me what I was planning to do after graduation. I said I was thinking of getting an MFA. Her face paled with what seemed to be genuine concern. She said,

Graduate school isn’t for everyone. There’s nothing wrong with being a housewife. My sister is a housewife, and she is perfectly happy.

Perhaps she was reacting to the fact that I was obviously miserable in her class and that she didn’t think I should subject myself to more classroom time. Even though I did not like her or respect her, what she told me has echoed throughout my adult life. I am not good enough for graduate school. I could have just applied to MFA programs out of spite, but considering how little money I had, the best and safest option for me was to go out into the professional world.

The Mother Years

I married my college boyfriend at 26, had my first child at 28 and my fifth child at 40. There were times I worked outside the home, but more often than not I stayed home because the childcare would cost more than what I would be making. I became, somewhat to my shame, the housewife my professor had proposed. During this time I also battled such severe depression that there were stretches of time when I could not read or write.³ Part of my inability to function was due to my mental illness and the other was the medication used to treat it. After my last child was born I went off of medication, and I regained things like a sense of smell, a fuller range of emotions, and a desire to write creatively for the first time in years. However, my lifestyle and depression also made me extremely isolated and lonely. In my search for friends, I found

Melanie Bettinelli

, a mother my age who seemed exceptionally nice and also had many kids. I found out that she loved poetry so I decided to fake liking poetry so we could have something to talk about. This was not hard because I was still “spite reading” Dana Gioia and listening to every podcast he was on. I could talk about Ted Kooser, Jared Carter, Kay Ryan, and Felix Stefanile with my new friend — all thanks to the enemy of my old professor. And then one day, my new friend gave me a book: A.E. Stallings’s 2012 collection, Olives. My life was never the same after that, and I was further changed when I read Like, which was a 2019 finalist for the Pulitzer.

Poetry finally became personal for me. A mother was giving me something beautiful written by a mother about things that were interesting to me. It was relevant to my life, and the book was gifted to me out of love. For so many years poetry was thrown at me with so little regard to who I was and what I needed to hear at that moment. Before then I read poetry to strip it of information, like the students in Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry”:

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

I had been conditioned to think of poetry in terms of what it could do for me, how it could make me smarter and look cultured. Its value was in how it could advance me and sate some type of desire to be seen. I was treating poems as objects to be used. Their beauty meant nothing to me, and I didn’t care about the souls that created them. Why? Because the culture of poetry in the 1980s and 1990s profited from creating experts in poetry who made livings off of people like me: the English major. Every paper in which I failed to see the feminist agenda of Emily Dickinson or the avant-garde sensibilities of Ezra Pound was an occasion to point out my lack of intelligence. I was never given the time to just love the language or to just come up with my own simple, unsophisticated interpretation. My instructors left me in a room with a poem, and I learned to take a whip to it or else I would fail my senior class in literary theory.

My higher education was a death march that starved the poet in me, the girl who loved music and lyrics. Two mothers, my friend and A.E. Stallings, nursed her back to life. (And now you know why A.E. Stallings tops the list of my three favorite living poets.) After reading her, I was able to re-approach the literary criticism of Gioia with a softened heart. Despite his intelligence and depth of knowledge, his writing is generous and accessible to people who feel they don’t know anything about poetry. He had told me what to look for all those years, but I was finally ready to remove the blindfold and see the verse line by line, with more patience. I was no longer trying to beat confessions from the poems. I was ready to have conversations with them. I was ready to listen, but it would take time.

I’m Not Dead Yet! I Feel Happy!

Is poetry part of the public world? Yes. Is good poetry being produced today? Yes. Is there accessible instruction in all types of poetry? Yes, in fact we have many ways of educating people in non-metrical, metrical, and translations of poetry, and it has grown more economical with the proliferation of virtual instruction programs (one of the rare good fruits of the pandemic). Poetry culture is no longer locked up in the ivory tower. Are young people learning about and enjoying poetry? Yes, it appears so. And it is worth it to note that when Dana Gioia was chairman of the NEA he helped create Poetry Out Loud, a poetry recitation competition for high school students. Performance is another way of fully immersing yourself in poetic language.

So what is the problem? It seems to me that critics want Lazarus to rise from the tomb immediately, not remembering that he lay in there for four whole days. It took decades to perpetrate the damage done to poetic culture. It may take the same amount of time if not longer for it to get better — but I think it will. We see evidence of positive change, and we have more people learning about poetry now than ever before. Look at how much I have changed.

I read poetry. I write poetry. I recite poetry.

But I don’t love poetry. I love people. I love poets.

Poetry doesn’t die. Poets do — and so there is no time to waste. There is too much beauty to be had in this one wild and precious life. So much joy in the sounds, the images.

Find a poem that speaks to you, that makes you happy and means something to you. Learn it by heart. Conjure it up from memory whenever you need it. When you memorize a poem it becomes a part of you, and it lives a life with you and within you. You become the rhapsode, breathing new life into the poem. When we all do this and teach our children to do this and they teach their children then poetry will never die — even though we do.

I’d love to know…

What was your poetry education like?

Do you write poetry? Or did you write poetry and then stop?

Has anyone ever made you feel like you were bad a poetry?

What did you think of this story?

This is just part of my story. There is more to come later. Please let me know if you want to hear more of what happened.

Next up: HOW TO MEMORIZE A POEM IN 15 MINUTES!

I publish 2-3 times a month at not at regular intervals because of my very unpredictable schedule. Please stay tuned. Thank you so much for reading!

1. Matthew Walther, wrote the much discussed ”Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month”, an opinion piece in The New York Times (December, 2022).

2. This is the MFA program where I am currently enrolled. For a taste of what they offer, there is an in-person summer program that you can learn about here.

3. I’ve written about my depression and inability to read here: How to Read a Novel in 30 Years. The novel in question is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.