I am writing this from the vantage point of 67 years old. I went to college, for a while in my 30s, but hated it. I'm sorry you were too young to understand that college professors are not experts (generally speaking) of anything except their own perspective, their own lives. We lived in poverty, (when I was a kid) This is not to moan or cry - just to explain. Once we moved from New York state, there were no more public libraries near me; or even those mobile libraries. At that time, most folks didn't buy books and we certainly could not afford anything like that. Sometimes my mom could find .95 cents for a scholastic summer reading book. Because I, my mom (who loved to read too) would take any paperback or old book that happened to come our way, and read it to death and then pass it on to someone else, I got to read some old old books, some trashy old paperback novels. One town we moved to had a 'public library'.. It was all of the books that a lady in that town had, or could find or get donated. It wasn't updated regularly, because back then in the Bible belt, not many people read books, aside from The Bible. One summer in high school, in Oklahoma, our 'school library' (ha! shittiest library a school ever had--but I realized years later that then, Okla. had very little funding for public schools) That 'library' was a closet with shelving, and you had to stand at a glass window, and point to what you wanted to check out ....you could not even look at the book ahead of time. All the books were old, no recent ones. in high school, I happened across a Carl Sandberg book of poems. I was so desperate and so ready to leave Oklahoma but because of poverty, could go no where. I began memorizing Sandberg's poems. It gave me something to do, something to think about, the summer before I left for the Army. I loved poetry, for what it could do for your brain, and how it could lift you out of sadness, or despair. I did have jobs here and there from the time I was 12, and that helped me buy a book now and then, along with school clothes, etc. Well, this is all jumbled, I'm writing in a hurry with no plan, but anyway, there's my contribution, for whatever it's worth. (not much)
Thank you so much for your story Sherry. We all come from different places, and I think it's important to hear how lack of resources really focuses a person on what people really need in order to get to the next day. Material needs are paramount, but you also need something of beauty or truth too. I am glad you got Sandberg's poetry when you did. I'd love to hear more about your experiences.
Brilliant! Thank you so much for your encouraging and inspiring voice. I hated poetry through schooling, ignored it through most of my life, and then suddenly in my 70s discovered John Donne's Holy Sonnets. It's such a delight to be awoken to joy by a series of accidents. I even wrote a book about them. I even wrote a sonnet, my first (and, so far, only) serious poem. Now I'm reading other poets (one of them pointed me to this article). Your essay explains so much to me. Thank you!
Hi Graham, I just wrote you a very long reply and it got lost! *sigh* But I will try to recap here… I am so glad that this post spoke to you. It is really interesting how there seems to be multiple generations of people who could have loved poetry if they were introduced to it in a different way. I am so glad that you found Donne and his Holy Sonnets. I love them too, as well as another metaphysical poet George Herbert. Karen Swallow Prior did a number of essay on the metaphysical poets which I found delightful. Her explication of the poems is enlightening. I would love to hear more about your Donne book, and I am so glad you wrote a sonnet. Keep going, keep writing. There is much “human flourishing” to be had in the creation of art. Don’t worry about quality. Just relish in the joy of language. It heals the soul!
Thank you Zina for your very gracious and encouraging reply, especially having lost it the first time! FYI the book is Conflicted Faith and is available through most bookstores. The Amazon link is https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B095PP48DQ. These poems spoke to me about honest struggles with God - doubt, fear, "why me?" kind of things. So I wrote a devotional commentary from my Christian perspective, hoping to introduce a new audience to these extraordinarily evocative poems. I've just scratched the surface of George Herbert - you've inspired to go back and read more. I look forward to your future essays and poems.
I think one if the things that makes Herbert really stand out are his concrete poems, which unlike modern concrete poems still retain regular metrical stresses. The Altar, Angel Wings, etc. they are wonders.
Thanks - I just took a look. I have a complete works on my Kindle, but reading on my phone, I've just realized I should view horizontally to get the shape of his poetry. Terrific stuff. He was much more sure about his faith than Donne.
If you do an online search for “angel wings poem herbert” it will pull up all the visual layouts of the poem. It can be laid out differently depending on the editor.
Zina, I love the heart behind this piece. Poetry is a like my favorite blanket, from whom I've been estranged for too long. I enjoyed reading about your relationship with poetry.
That being said, I disagree with your conclusion; every research project on the subject that I've seen within the last 3 years or so has shown that the reading of poetry in the U.S. has decreased or, at best, remained at approximately the same rate. I believe your viewpoint is an insider's viewpoint, and that you're looking at the state of poetry with rose colored glasses. However, it's certainly possible that the researchers have it wrong. Perhaps they don't count the K-Pop and J-Pop and P-Pop fans who spend hours conversing about song lyrics. Maybe they're not including YouTubers making reaction videos about rappers, or as you mentioned -- influencers sharing clever verses. Still, I hope all this doesn't overshadow poetry's previous forms.
In several sections of "Dilexit nos," Pope Francis points to the importance of poetry especially in an age obsessed with A.I. and algorithms. I encourage anyone interested in poetry to look up these reflections.
Thank you, Zina. Your corner of Substack is always so welcoming.
Thank you for your comment, and I am sorry I’m just getting around to replying now because I think your points are very good. I have to check out “Dilexit nos” — I have not had the time to read it, but it will head upward on my priority list.
As far as whether poetry is being read, I think it isn’t being sought out or bought as much — other than is the case with Rupi Kaur. And I doubt anyone knows that we have a US Poet Laureate, let alone who she is. However, I think that poetry is being seen because it is more a part of public life and on social media.
Rap is more a form of poetry than song in many ways. Sappho had her lyre — music and words go with each other, but some forms of song are more spoken than sung and that makes them more akin to what we know as poetry.
I think what may need to happen is a public discussion on what poetry is and what its function is in society. The presence of poetry in political events, weddings, funerals, in churches, on sidewalks, in parks, on billboards or what have you — these count as a poetic presence. I think one of the interesting aspects of poetry is that I think that people will read poetry… but if it is free. That may be an essential ingredient to increasing poetic literacy, and it is an unfortunate thing to being a poet. There isn’t a livelihood in this work. It is done pro bono publica.
Sorry for all of that… I have lots of thoughts on this. I think personally I see more poetry now that I did when I was growing up. And I never really sought it out until I met Melanie Bettinelli.
I feel like I need to respond to this via another Substack post, there is so much to say. In brief, none of my family members reads or particularly cares about poetry. I was drawn to it from a young age and I can’t really tell you why. Starting in elementary school I would memorize short poems and check out anthologies from the library. I have almost no formal instruction on poetry and I didn’t take any poetry classes in college. Sometimes professors would assume I knew about meter and rhyme schemes, but I didn’t. I know iambic pentameter and that is about it. That being said, I read poetry on my own, often out loud in my room and I loved it. Once in middle school and once in high school I had poetry published in one of those poetry by young people collections. While I realize those exist primarily to take money from parents, I did enjoy seeing my name in print and my poem on the page.
On a humorous note, when asked to analyze poetry in high school, my husband insisted that every poem was about communism. He would write ridiculous essays about how this poem about an orange was really about the communist state. He was joking, of course, but his insistence on using only one literary lens was not so far fetched…
Zina, your poetic journey is inspiring! I seem to have dabbled in poetry throughout the years with spurts here and there of writing poems beginning in 5th grade when my teacher Miss Scala said that my poems make pictures! I took a few workshops in poetry here and there throughout the years but still read mostly fiction. Getting my MFA was a turning point in appreciating, reading, and writing more poetry. Although my MFA is general without a concentration my writing since then has been poetry and I am getting closer to calling myself a poet! Your essays are not only inspiring but also informative and give me many new avenues to explore and invigorate my creativity. Keep on doing what you are doing and I know all things will work out.
Thank you so much, Diane. Yes, it has been a strange journey for me. So many of my friends had at least written poetry when they were younger. I got into poetry very late by comparison. I am so glad we met at Frost Farm. That conference was one of so many connections and blessings.
Awww, I am glad you are here too Jody! Matthew is the best! Love him so much, and he is supportive of so many different people. I can't wait to read your essay. I hope you will stick around. I have a couple more essays coming up that you will probably like. <3
The essence of this essay is its heart and soul that you embody, Zina, and in this Substack and in our few personal exchanges I feel I've come to know you. What a pleasure to read this and see your words come alive like song.
Thank you so much, Mary. You've been such a good mentor and friend to me. I've always meant to write this story of how I became a poet which is a title I've only recently accepted over the past few months). If it were not for this jump into poetry I never would have started a Substack and thus never met you, so our friendship is a fruit of poetry. Isn't that wonderful?
I really loved reading this and am so sad that academia caused you to spurn poetry for so long! I fell in love with poetry when I was in 4th grade because my teacher loved poetry and we did a whole unit on it. I have written lots of bad poems in my life but have enjoyed writing all of them. Even though my college professors inspired me to love poetry more, I was made to feel like a bad poet on more than one occasion by other students. Thanks for sharing this!
Hi, Erin! I am so glad you liked reading this. Having a teacher who truly loves poetry makes all the difference. It happens with any subject. I have written MANY bad poems too. It takes some type of happy accident to get on the road to making good poetry. I never would have been able to do it without the UST MFA program in Houston. (It is remote.) It has transformed both my versecraft and my prose writing. It has also changed how I see the world. It's been a great blessing to my life. The only reason why I started this Substack was to fund my MFA tuition, but in the process of writing about poetry here I feel like I've met so many wonderful people like you. Keep writing poetry! Much love, Z
Thanks for this beauty personal story Zina. I enjoyed it. I haven't come to love poetry yet but I am developing a taste for it. Some collections have resonated with me quite a bit.
I am so happy to see your name in the comments! I think it is really hard to love poetry if you've had such little exposure, but sometimes it takes finding the right poet. With me it was Alicia Stallings. There's a poet named Anthony Hecht who served in WW2, and he ultimately became the US Poet Laureate. His story is fascinating, and I think you should get his biography by David Yezzi and his complete works (I borrowed them from the library but ended up buying the bio because I loved it so much). I can see you liking some poems by Richard Wilbur as well. We can talk more later!
My mother never finished her college degree, but she studied literature and she loved reading and books and our house was filled with books. She mostly read science-fiction and fantasy novels and a smattering of mysteries. But there were poetry books on the shelf: A Norton Anthology, a volume of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, a book called Story Poems. I think she told me that she read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to me when I was still in utero. And I had volumes of Mother Goose Rhymes and my mom sang nursery rhymes to me and recited bits of poetry to me. So poetry was very much in the air, it was part of my mother tongue. I mean I didn't go around reciting it all the time or anything, but it was also not a foreign country. It was there and it was normal, part of my world.
When we read poetry in school I mostly loved it. When we memorized poetry I took to it like a duck to water. Poetry fed my soul. There were poems l liked and poems I didn't like so much. I didn't have patience for a lot of longer poems. I remember looking for the short poems in the Norton Anthology. I remember skipping the longer poems in Frost. I fell in love with Tennyson's Crossing the Bar and Carl Sandburg's Fog. I loved The Highwayman with its rhythm and drama. Some teachers were good at teaching poetry, some not so much, but what happened in school didn't really touch my inner world except when occasionally some new poem came my way and I fell in love with it. Though sometimes not the whole poem, just a line or two, a stanza.
I remember falling in love with parts of Tennyson's Ulysses, with The Lady of Shalott. I remember memorizing a Shakespeare sonnet and parts of Shakespeare plays. In high school I discovered The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and fell in love with Eliot. By high school I had a file on the computer where I wrote bad poetry and I printed my poems off and saved them. I turned in poems for projects in school at least a couple of times-- one was a loose response to The Once and Future King. I memorized poems in my Latin class too. My Latin teacher said I had a knack for dramatic recitation.
I was lucky to stumble across the University of Dallas which had a very conservative approach to literature. We didn't study much literary theory-- though we were introduced to it. Mostly we just read literature and discussed it. We loved it for the way it showed the world truly, for the great conversation of ideas that it was a part of. At first I was a classics major, but by the end of my freshman year I switched to English. We read a lot of poetry-- including a junior-year project where we were expected to become an expert on a poet. I chose Eliot and I think I rocked my oral exam. I continued to write poems occasionally when inspiration struck. I occasionally sent them to friends.
I never took any creative writing classes and what I know about poetry and meter and form is what I was taught in English classes where we were analyzing poems, not writing them. So I have a lot of head knowledge of formal poetry and a lot of experience reading throughout the poetic tradition. I was taught how to scan poetry, but never did it well. So as a poet, I'm self-taught and still wobbly about how to actually write in metrical form, but not for lack of exposure or understanding.
I love to try to bring more people to poetry. I'm passionate about helping people to learn to love poetry for its beauty and to push back against the kind of reading that is reductive and utilitarian. You don't have to be able to analyze a poem to enjoy it. You don't have to understand a poem to love it. Poetry speaks to us on the level of music and image and sound, and meaning is secondary to those.
You are such an inspiration to me. You've had such a natural relationship with poetry all your life, and it is such a gift to your family and friends. It's hard to get that knowledge about how to write poetry. A lot of people say you don't need an MFA, but I seriously don't know how I could have ever gone from what I was writing to what I am writing now without a heavy duty program. I love how you say that "Poetry fed my soul." All the best poetry should do that!
I wish I could give everyone the gift of a natural relationship with poetry. But failing that I just want to encourage people to find a door into that world. What makes me saddest is that so often it is teachers who close that door. I would also like to encourage teachers to step back from too much analysis and scrutiny to let students just find poems they enjoy and to linger in that enjoyment without having to do something more with the poem.
I read poetry with my children daily. Sometimes we study one poet for a term and other times I read from an anthology. My husband spends more time talking about poetry formally with our boys because he reads them Tolkien’s poetry and he gets excited about the meter and meaning. My husband is gratified that they often understand what is going on in the poems without explanation. I think that simply reading poems with them has helped. They are still young (11 down to 6), but I see slivers of poetic interest. My daughter started memorizing bits of poetry from our recitation pieces when she was 3 or so. She would spontaneously recite a stanza from a poem we were reciting at the time. My son wrote a funny, sarcastic retelling of a Valentine’s Day classic for his sister:
Roses are pointy,
Violets aren’t blue
Guess who is stupid,
Who hoo it’s you!
(I also made him send her a nice valentine. She thinks it is a riot and recites it to people all the time.)
Yes! All of this. I probably under-taught poetry to my own children, especially in high school --- that is, I assigned a lot to read (and we'd always read a lot aloud), but I was totally allergic to the idea of trying to push them to wring meanings out of it, and even more allergic to "creative writing." People who wanted to write their own imaginative things did write their own imaginative things, but I wasn't going to force anybody.
And it's been interesting to see how their relationships with poetry have played out. It's cropped up in funny places, especially for my children who've gone to the University of Dallas (a truly great place). My youngest daughter is a visual artist and never seemed that into poetry, but she wrote a sonnet (about Borzois!) for her astronomy professor last year (he has Borzois!), just for fun. And it was a totally competent sonnet. She just decided she wanted to write one, so she did, and now she knows she can.
This was probably made somewhat easier not only by the fact that she had read a lot of sonnets in high school, but also by being in a college atmosphere where this kind of thing is not weird. Being, somehow, in a context where, when you say, "Hey, I'd like to write a sonnet," somebody else says, "Hey, great idea," seems helpful and important.
Ditto on under-teaching poetry. I probably don't even read it nearly enough. (I wish I had been better at getting them to memorize and recite it, but we've had challenges.) But it's definitely part of our daily life and all my kids have had poems for copywork, which is a great way to learn to pay more careful attention to them.
Oldest daughter has always composed little poems and second daughter occasionally has done so when she was little. I think youngest daughter writes them too, but doesn't show them to me. She's frequently writing *something*.
My 14 year old son has recently started to show some interest in poetic forms and we've had some good discussions about stanzas and rhyme schemes. He even spontaneously marked the rhyme scheme of a sonnet I'd given him for copywork. The 15 year boy old copies haiku with me every day and writes one a day as well.
So yeah it's there in the atmosphere even if we've never really had any formal classes on poetry.
Oh and all my kids end up watching Malcolm Guite's lovely poetry chat videos on YouTube with me. He's an education in himself.
We're currently reading Malcolm Guite's collection Word in the Wilderness for Lent and I don't know how much anyone is getting out of it, but at least they're listening.
I love that your daughter just spontaneously wrote a sonnet for her astronomy teacher. That's so delightful.
Also, what that teacher did, discouraging the student by telling her that her Gibran poem wasn't good enough. That's a crime. That's exactly the opposite of how to teach poetry. It makes me so angry.
I do love how your spite reading of Dana Gioia became a door.
I enjoyed this so much! You have inspired me to contemplate my relationship with poetry, and I may write about it in my next newsletter. In the meantime, I am going to memorize the poem I wrote in my journal this morning. :)
Yes! Memorizing your own poems is wonderful! Love it. And thank you so much for your comment. I cannot wait to read your next newsletter and hear your story.
You are so kind! I had a writing day yesterday, and I decided that I need more time for a piece on my relationship with poetry. So I'm pondering and making notes for now for a future piece. I'm going ahead with a piece on what I've been reading lately, as originally planned. Blessings!
About poetry education as regards myself: I never took a class on poetry. About 4 workshops in the past 27 years. I read poetry. Trying to get my nerve up to explore more forms as in Runyan’s “How to Write a Form poem “. Been writing poems off and on for 50 years. I have an extensive poetry library and read a minimum of two poems a day. Not been submitting work for past 15 years. Have a blog I post on occasionally. Doing more writing past 6 years since retirement. I remember reading the essay by Dana Gioia in the 90’s. Poetry definitely should matter!
At the satire/humor journal I help perpetrate, we write and publish six or more linguimerics (limericks on linguistics) a month. Then for a while we fixated on triolets. So, I say compose a few triolets. They'll hurt your brain in a good way.
Oh, triolets! I have written a couple. They are so hard. I actually wrote a book review for Memory's Abacus which has a crown sequence of 40 triolets. It is quite extraordinary (I was a wee bit critical).
I will say that it *is* worth it to keep trying them. I recommend reading Josh Mehigan's After the Disaster to get some inspiration. That collection is quite devastating though. Perhaps in a good way?
Darlene, thank you for the comment. It sounds like you have a wonderful poetry life and that it is very much a part of you. That's the way poetry should work. I hope you keep writing and that it gives you great joy!
I was amused by Zina Gomez-Liss's description of her college poetry class in which I was condemned as the enemy. I've heard similar accounts from other people at other schools. I'm grateful to these enraged professors for sending serious, independent readers to my work.
How absolutely a wonder and a joy that the marvel that is Dana Gioia wrote here to you, Zina. Some years ago I did my first radio interview with Dana who lives in my heart because I own all of his books and _Autumn Inaugural_ from The Hudson Review that he graciously sent me.
I am writing this from the vantage point of 67 years old. I went to college, for a while in my 30s, but hated it. I'm sorry you were too young to understand that college professors are not experts (generally speaking) of anything except their own perspective, their own lives. We lived in poverty, (when I was a kid) This is not to moan or cry - just to explain. Once we moved from New York state, there were no more public libraries near me; or even those mobile libraries. At that time, most folks didn't buy books and we certainly could not afford anything like that. Sometimes my mom could find .95 cents for a scholastic summer reading book. Because I, my mom (who loved to read too) would take any paperback or old book that happened to come our way, and read it to death and then pass it on to someone else, I got to read some old old books, some trashy old paperback novels. One town we moved to had a 'public library'.. It was all of the books that a lady in that town had, or could find or get donated. It wasn't updated regularly, because back then in the Bible belt, not many people read books, aside from The Bible. One summer in high school, in Oklahoma, our 'school library' (ha! shittiest library a school ever had--but I realized years later that then, Okla. had very little funding for public schools) That 'library' was a closet with shelving, and you had to stand at a glass window, and point to what you wanted to check out ....you could not even look at the book ahead of time. All the books were old, no recent ones. in high school, I happened across a Carl Sandberg book of poems. I was so desperate and so ready to leave Oklahoma but because of poverty, could go no where. I began memorizing Sandberg's poems. It gave me something to do, something to think about, the summer before I left for the Army. I loved poetry, for what it could do for your brain, and how it could lift you out of sadness, or despair. I did have jobs here and there from the time I was 12, and that helped me buy a book now and then, along with school clothes, etc. Well, this is all jumbled, I'm writing in a hurry with no plan, but anyway, there's my contribution, for whatever it's worth. (not much)
Thank you so much for your story Sherry. We all come from different places, and I think it's important to hear how lack of resources really focuses a person on what people really need in order to get to the next day. Material needs are paramount, but you also need something of beauty or truth too. I am glad you got Sandberg's poetry when you did. I'd love to hear more about your experiences.
Brilliant! Thank you so much for your encouraging and inspiring voice. I hated poetry through schooling, ignored it through most of my life, and then suddenly in my 70s discovered John Donne's Holy Sonnets. It's such a delight to be awoken to joy by a series of accidents. I even wrote a book about them. I even wrote a sonnet, my first (and, so far, only) serious poem. Now I'm reading other poets (one of them pointed me to this article). Your essay explains so much to me. Thank you!
Hi Graham, I just wrote you a very long reply and it got lost! *sigh* But I will try to recap here… I am so glad that this post spoke to you. It is really interesting how there seems to be multiple generations of people who could have loved poetry if they were introduced to it in a different way. I am so glad that you found Donne and his Holy Sonnets. I love them too, as well as another metaphysical poet George Herbert. Karen Swallow Prior did a number of essay on the metaphysical poets which I found delightful. Her explication of the poems is enlightening. I would love to hear more about your Donne book, and I am so glad you wrote a sonnet. Keep going, keep writing. There is much “human flourishing” to be had in the creation of art. Don’t worry about quality. Just relish in the joy of language. It heals the soul!
Thank you Zina for your very gracious and encouraging reply, especially having lost it the first time! FYI the book is Conflicted Faith and is available through most bookstores. The Amazon link is https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B095PP48DQ. These poems spoke to me about honest struggles with God - doubt, fear, "why me?" kind of things. So I wrote a devotional commentary from my Christian perspective, hoping to introduce a new audience to these extraordinarily evocative poems. I've just scratched the surface of George Herbert - you've inspired to go back and read more. I look forward to your future essays and poems.
I think one if the things that makes Herbert really stand out are his concrete poems, which unlike modern concrete poems still retain regular metrical stresses. The Altar, Angel Wings, etc. they are wonders.
Thanks - I just took a look. I have a complete works on my Kindle, but reading on my phone, I've just realized I should view horizontally to get the shape of his poetry. Terrific stuff. He was much more sure about his faith than Donne.
If you do an online search for “angel wings poem herbert” it will pull up all the visual layouts of the poem. It can be laid out differently depending on the editor.
Hi, I’m new to Substack and hope you check me out and follow The DTLA Poet. Thanks!
Zina, I love the heart behind this piece. Poetry is a like my favorite blanket, from whom I've been estranged for too long. I enjoyed reading about your relationship with poetry.
That being said, I disagree with your conclusion; every research project on the subject that I've seen within the last 3 years or so has shown that the reading of poetry in the U.S. has decreased or, at best, remained at approximately the same rate. I believe your viewpoint is an insider's viewpoint, and that you're looking at the state of poetry with rose colored glasses. However, it's certainly possible that the researchers have it wrong. Perhaps they don't count the K-Pop and J-Pop and P-Pop fans who spend hours conversing about song lyrics. Maybe they're not including YouTubers making reaction videos about rappers, or as you mentioned -- influencers sharing clever verses. Still, I hope all this doesn't overshadow poetry's previous forms.
In several sections of "Dilexit nos," Pope Francis points to the importance of poetry especially in an age obsessed with A.I. and algorithms. I encourage anyone interested in poetry to look up these reflections.
Thank you, Zina. Your corner of Substack is always so welcoming.
Thank you for your comment, and I am sorry I’m just getting around to replying now because I think your points are very good. I have to check out “Dilexit nos” — I have not had the time to read it, but it will head upward on my priority list.
As far as whether poetry is being read, I think it isn’t being sought out or bought as much — other than is the case with Rupi Kaur. And I doubt anyone knows that we have a US Poet Laureate, let alone who she is. However, I think that poetry is being seen because it is more a part of public life and on social media.
Rap is more a form of poetry than song in many ways. Sappho had her lyre — music and words go with each other, but some forms of song are more spoken than sung and that makes them more akin to what we know as poetry.
I think what may need to happen is a public discussion on what poetry is and what its function is in society. The presence of poetry in political events, weddings, funerals, in churches, on sidewalks, in parks, on billboards or what have you — these count as a poetic presence. I think one of the interesting aspects of poetry is that I think that people will read poetry… but if it is free. That may be an essential ingredient to increasing poetic literacy, and it is an unfortunate thing to being a poet. There isn’t a livelihood in this work. It is done pro bono publica.
Sorry for all of that… I have lots of thoughts on this. I think personally I see more poetry now that I did when I was growing up. And I never really sought it out until I met Melanie Bettinelli.
Makes sense! No need to apologize; I enjoy our comment conversations.
I feel like I need to respond to this via another Substack post, there is so much to say. In brief, none of my family members reads or particularly cares about poetry. I was drawn to it from a young age and I can’t really tell you why. Starting in elementary school I would memorize short poems and check out anthologies from the library. I have almost no formal instruction on poetry and I didn’t take any poetry classes in college. Sometimes professors would assume I knew about meter and rhyme schemes, but I didn’t. I know iambic pentameter and that is about it. That being said, I read poetry on my own, often out loud in my room and I loved it. Once in middle school and once in high school I had poetry published in one of those poetry by young people collections. While I realize those exist primarily to take money from parents, I did enjoy seeing my name in print and my poem on the page.
On a humorous note, when asked to analyze poetry in high school, my husband insisted that every poem was about communism. He would write ridiculous essays about how this poem about an orange was really about the communist state. He was joking, of course, but his insistence on using only one literary lens was not so far fetched…
LOL your husband sounds a lot like my husband!
You should definitely write your own Substack post. I would love to hear more details about your own poetry journey!
Boom, Zina!!!! This is not only a beautiful glimpse of YOU, it is an extremely well- written essay about poetry culture writ large. Great!!!
Thank you so much, Carla. I am certainly not as well practiced (and certainly not as published) as you are, so for me this is high praise.
Zina, your poetic journey is inspiring! I seem to have dabbled in poetry throughout the years with spurts here and there of writing poems beginning in 5th grade when my teacher Miss Scala said that my poems make pictures! I took a few workshops in poetry here and there throughout the years but still read mostly fiction. Getting my MFA was a turning point in appreciating, reading, and writing more poetry. Although my MFA is general without a concentration my writing since then has been poetry and I am getting closer to calling myself a poet! Your essays are not only inspiring but also informative and give me many new avenues to explore and invigorate my creativity. Keep on doing what you are doing and I know all things will work out.
Thank you so much, Diane. Yes, it has been a strange journey for me. So many of my friends had at least written poetry when they were younger. I got into poetry very late by comparison. I am so glad we met at Frost Farm. That conference was one of so many connections and blessings.
Zina, this is a great line: "But I don’t love poetry. I love people. I love poets." All the poets I know and love were first friends in real life....
How did I come to poetry? Matthew Long invited me to write an essay about it which I believe you can read next week :-)
So glad you're here, making the world safe for poetry.
Awww, I am glad you are here too Jody! Matthew is the best! Love him so much, and he is supportive of so many different people. I can't wait to read your essay. I hope you will stick around. I have a couple more essays coming up that you will probably like. <3
The essence of this essay is its heart and soul that you embody, Zina, and in this Substack and in our few personal exchanges I feel I've come to know you. What a pleasure to read this and see your words come alive like song.
Thank you so much, Mary. You've been such a good mentor and friend to me. I've always meant to write this story of how I became a poet which is a title I've only recently accepted over the past few months). If it were not for this jump into poetry I never would have started a Substack and thus never met you, so our friendship is a fruit of poetry. Isn't that wonderful?
It is indeed, Zina!
I really loved reading this and am so sad that academia caused you to spurn poetry for so long! I fell in love with poetry when I was in 4th grade because my teacher loved poetry and we did a whole unit on it. I have written lots of bad poems in my life but have enjoyed writing all of them. Even though my college professors inspired me to love poetry more, I was made to feel like a bad poet on more than one occasion by other students. Thanks for sharing this!
Hi, Erin! I am so glad you liked reading this. Having a teacher who truly loves poetry makes all the difference. It happens with any subject. I have written MANY bad poems too. It takes some type of happy accident to get on the road to making good poetry. I never would have been able to do it without the UST MFA program in Houston. (It is remote.) It has transformed both my versecraft and my prose writing. It has also changed how I see the world. It's been a great blessing to my life. The only reason why I started this Substack was to fund my MFA tuition, but in the process of writing about poetry here I feel like I've met so many wonderful people like you. Keep writing poetry! Much love, Z
Thanks for this beauty personal story Zina. I enjoyed it. I haven't come to love poetry yet but I am developing a taste for it. Some collections have resonated with me quite a bit.
I am so happy to see your name in the comments! I think it is really hard to love poetry if you've had such little exposure, but sometimes it takes finding the right poet. With me it was Alicia Stallings. There's a poet named Anthony Hecht who served in WW2, and he ultimately became the US Poet Laureate. His story is fascinating, and I think you should get his biography by David Yezzi and his complete works (I borrowed them from the library but ended up buying the bio because I loved it so much). I can see you liking some poems by Richard Wilbur as well. We can talk more later!
My mother never finished her college degree, but she studied literature and she loved reading and books and our house was filled with books. She mostly read science-fiction and fantasy novels and a smattering of mysteries. But there were poetry books on the shelf: A Norton Anthology, a volume of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, a book called Story Poems. I think she told me that she read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass to me when I was still in utero. And I had volumes of Mother Goose Rhymes and my mom sang nursery rhymes to me and recited bits of poetry to me. So poetry was very much in the air, it was part of my mother tongue. I mean I didn't go around reciting it all the time or anything, but it was also not a foreign country. It was there and it was normal, part of my world.
When we read poetry in school I mostly loved it. When we memorized poetry I took to it like a duck to water. Poetry fed my soul. There were poems l liked and poems I didn't like so much. I didn't have patience for a lot of longer poems. I remember looking for the short poems in the Norton Anthology. I remember skipping the longer poems in Frost. I fell in love with Tennyson's Crossing the Bar and Carl Sandburg's Fog. I loved The Highwayman with its rhythm and drama. Some teachers were good at teaching poetry, some not so much, but what happened in school didn't really touch my inner world except when occasionally some new poem came my way and I fell in love with it. Though sometimes not the whole poem, just a line or two, a stanza.
I remember falling in love with parts of Tennyson's Ulysses, with The Lady of Shalott. I remember memorizing a Shakespeare sonnet and parts of Shakespeare plays. In high school I discovered The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and fell in love with Eliot. By high school I had a file on the computer where I wrote bad poetry and I printed my poems off and saved them. I turned in poems for projects in school at least a couple of times-- one was a loose response to The Once and Future King. I memorized poems in my Latin class too. My Latin teacher said I had a knack for dramatic recitation.
I was lucky to stumble across the University of Dallas which had a very conservative approach to literature. We didn't study much literary theory-- though we were introduced to it. Mostly we just read literature and discussed it. We loved it for the way it showed the world truly, for the great conversation of ideas that it was a part of. At first I was a classics major, but by the end of my freshman year I switched to English. We read a lot of poetry-- including a junior-year project where we were expected to become an expert on a poet. I chose Eliot and I think I rocked my oral exam. I continued to write poems occasionally when inspiration struck. I occasionally sent them to friends.
I never took any creative writing classes and what I know about poetry and meter and form is what I was taught in English classes where we were analyzing poems, not writing them. So I have a lot of head knowledge of formal poetry and a lot of experience reading throughout the poetic tradition. I was taught how to scan poetry, but never did it well. So as a poet, I'm self-taught and still wobbly about how to actually write in metrical form, but not for lack of exposure or understanding.
I love to try to bring more people to poetry. I'm passionate about helping people to learn to love poetry for its beauty and to push back against the kind of reading that is reductive and utilitarian. You don't have to be able to analyze a poem to enjoy it. You don't have to understand a poem to love it. Poetry speaks to us on the level of music and image and sound, and meaning is secondary to those.
You are such an inspiration to me. You've had such a natural relationship with poetry all your life, and it is such a gift to your family and friends. It's hard to get that knowledge about how to write poetry. A lot of people say you don't need an MFA, but I seriously don't know how I could have ever gone from what I was writing to what I am writing now without a heavy duty program. I love how you say that "Poetry fed my soul." All the best poetry should do that!
I wish I could give everyone the gift of a natural relationship with poetry. But failing that I just want to encourage people to find a door into that world. What makes me saddest is that so often it is teachers who close that door. I would also like to encourage teachers to step back from too much analysis and scrutiny to let students just find poems they enjoy and to linger in that enjoyment without having to do something more with the poem.
I read poetry with my children daily. Sometimes we study one poet for a term and other times I read from an anthology. My husband spends more time talking about poetry formally with our boys because he reads them Tolkien’s poetry and he gets excited about the meter and meaning. My husband is gratified that they often understand what is going on in the poems without explanation. I think that simply reading poems with them has helped. They are still young (11 down to 6), but I see slivers of poetic interest. My daughter started memorizing bits of poetry from our recitation pieces when she was 3 or so. She would spontaneously recite a stanza from a poem we were reciting at the time. My son wrote a funny, sarcastic retelling of a Valentine’s Day classic for his sister:
Roses are pointy,
Violets aren’t blue
Guess who is stupid,
Who hoo it’s you!
(I also made him send her a nice valentine. She thinks it is a riot and recites it to people all the time.)
Yes! All of this. I probably under-taught poetry to my own children, especially in high school --- that is, I assigned a lot to read (and we'd always read a lot aloud), but I was totally allergic to the idea of trying to push them to wring meanings out of it, and even more allergic to "creative writing." People who wanted to write their own imaginative things did write their own imaginative things, but I wasn't going to force anybody.
And it's been interesting to see how their relationships with poetry have played out. It's cropped up in funny places, especially for my children who've gone to the University of Dallas (a truly great place). My youngest daughter is a visual artist and never seemed that into poetry, but she wrote a sonnet (about Borzois!) for her astronomy professor last year (he has Borzois!), just for fun. And it was a totally competent sonnet. She just decided she wanted to write one, so she did, and now she knows she can.
This was probably made somewhat easier not only by the fact that she had read a lot of sonnets in high school, but also by being in a college atmosphere where this kind of thing is not weird. Being, somehow, in a context where, when you say, "Hey, I'd like to write a sonnet," somebody else says, "Hey, great idea," seems helpful and important.
Ditto on under-teaching poetry. I probably don't even read it nearly enough. (I wish I had been better at getting them to memorize and recite it, but we've had challenges.) But it's definitely part of our daily life and all my kids have had poems for copywork, which is a great way to learn to pay more careful attention to them.
Oldest daughter has always composed little poems and second daughter occasionally has done so when she was little. I think youngest daughter writes them too, but doesn't show them to me. She's frequently writing *something*.
My 14 year old son has recently started to show some interest in poetic forms and we've had some good discussions about stanzas and rhyme schemes. He even spontaneously marked the rhyme scheme of a sonnet I'd given him for copywork. The 15 year boy old copies haiku with me every day and writes one a day as well.
So yeah it's there in the atmosphere even if we've never really had any formal classes on poetry.
Oh and all my kids end up watching Malcolm Guite's lovely poetry chat videos on YouTube with me. He's an education in himself.
We're currently reading Malcolm Guite's collection Word in the Wilderness for Lent and I don't know how much anyone is getting out of it, but at least they're listening.
I love that your daughter just spontaneously wrote a sonnet for her astronomy teacher. That's so delightful.
Well, you know I could talk all day long about the power of copywork! I need to do more of it myself.
And yes, I loved that spontaneous sonnet, too. This daughter is full of surprises --- and she was really swept away by those Borzois.
Also, what that teacher did, discouraging the student by telling her that her Gibran poem wasn't good enough. That's a crime. That's exactly the opposite of how to teach poetry. It makes me so angry.
I do love how your spite reading of Dana Gioia became a door.
A.E. Stallings is amazing—one of very favorites.
Same. I don't know how anyone could not like Stallings. At least not if you like poetry at all. Her work offers so much on different levels.
I enjoyed this so much! You have inspired me to contemplate my relationship with poetry, and I may write about it in my next newsletter. In the meantime, I am going to memorize the poem I wrote in my journal this morning. :)
Yes! Memorizing your own poems is wonderful! Love it. And thank you so much for your comment. I cannot wait to read your next newsletter and hear your story.
You are so kind! I had a writing day yesterday, and I decided that I need more time for a piece on my relationship with poetry. So I'm pondering and making notes for now for a future piece. I'm going ahead with a piece on what I've been reading lately, as originally planned. Blessings!
About poetry education as regards myself: I never took a class on poetry. About 4 workshops in the past 27 years. I read poetry. Trying to get my nerve up to explore more forms as in Runyan’s “How to Write a Form poem “. Been writing poems off and on for 50 years. I have an extensive poetry library and read a minimum of two poems a day. Not been submitting work for past 15 years. Have a blog I post on occasionally. Doing more writing past 6 years since retirement. I remember reading the essay by Dana Gioia in the 90’s. Poetry definitely should matter!
At the satire/humor journal I help perpetrate, we write and publish six or more linguimerics (limericks on linguistics) a month. Then for a while we fixated on triolets. So, I say compose a few triolets. They'll hurt your brain in a good way.
Oh, triolets! I have written a couple. They are so hard. I actually wrote a book review for Memory's Abacus which has a crown sequence of 40 triolets. It is quite extraordinary (I was a wee bit critical).
https://newversereview.substack.com/p/a-review-of-memorys-abacus-by-anna
I will say that it *is* worth it to keep trying them. I recommend reading Josh Mehigan's After the Disaster to get some inspiration. That collection is quite devastating though. Perhaps in a good way?
Darlene, thank you for the comment. It sounds like you have a wonderful poetry life and that it is very much a part of you. That's the way poetry should work. I hope you keep writing and that it gives you great joy!
I was amused by Zina Gomez-Liss's description of her college poetry class in which I was condemned as the enemy. I've heard similar accounts from other people at other schools. I'm grateful to these enraged professors for sending serious, independent readers to my work.
Isn't literary life odd?
How absolutely a wonder and a joy that the marvel that is Dana Gioia wrote here to you, Zina. Some years ago I did my first radio interview with Dana who lives in my heart because I own all of his books and _Autumn Inaugural_ from The Hudson Review that he graciously sent me.