https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/matthew-zapruder-on-how-to-write-and-read-poems/
Your new book is called Why Poetry? and it speaks to why so many people don’t read poetry now and why perhaps poetry isn’t valued in the same way it used to be. Can you give me the short version of why you think that is?
It’s a complicated question. One reason is that people think poetry is hard and their idea about what’s hard about it is wrong. They think it’s hard because you have to decode it, but that’s actually not what’s hard about poetry. What’s hard about poetry is just accepting what is actually being said and not doing what we’re taught to do in school all the time, which is to translate things or decode them or try to unpack what they really mean. It’s not about that.
The other thing is that people think poetry is hard because we have a mistaken idea about what it’s for and what it is. We don’t understand why people make poems at all. We think, or we’re taught to think, that there are basically these riddles or messages that are hidden inside these containers called poems, which makes the poems just these annoyances and distractions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this: Why don’t they just say what they mean? Why do they make it so complicated? I think that would be a completely reasonable question if poems were what people typically say they are, but they aren’t what people say they are. They’re not. They aren’t riddles. Those are really the two things that keep people from reading poetry: This idea that they’re hard, coded messages and this general confusion about why people would make them at all.
The irony of it is that most people I know have had an experience at some point with poetry, either with reading it or writing it, where they cut through all that stuff. They have this personal, individual encounter with a poem and they forget to treat it like it’s a secret message, and they totally understand why it’s necessary, because clearly it says something in some way that could never be said otherwise. That’s something I try to touch base with a little bit in the book–remember that experience, that is the real experience. Not all this stuff that’s in your high school English class or that you’re taught in order to get the right answer on the test.
Students are often uncomfortable with the ambiguity of poetry. They want to know exactly what it means. They want there to be one correct interpretation.
It’s not their fault. They’re taught to treat poetry that way. I spent an undue amount of time looking at the textbooks that students have to read and the standardized test they have to take. The way those things talk about poetry is just horrendous. It’s no wonder nobody likes it. If this is what they say poetry actually is, then I don’t like that
How my heart sings 