Start Here If You Think You Hate Poetry

The problem was the worksheet.

Somebody handed you "The Road Not Taken" at fifteen, told you it was about being an individual, and then asked you to explain what the poet was feeling in three to five sentences. The poem isn't about being an individual. It's about a man inventing a flattering story for a choice he made at random, and it's a little bit mean. Nobody told you that. So you filed poetry under things other people pretend to like, and you moved on to books with plots.

Fair enough. But you've been missing the one form of writing built to be finished in the time it takes your coffee to cool.

Read it out loud or don't bother

Poetry is scored for the voice. Silent reading strips out half the information, which is why a poem on the page can look like a crossword and sound, spoken, like a man telling you something true across a table.

So: read aloud. Actually aloud, at conversational volume, in an empty kitchen if that's what it takes. If you feel ridiculous, you're doing it right for about ninety seconds and then you stop noticing.

Second rule. Don't analyze. Nobody's collecting this. If a poem hits you, read it again immediately. If it doesn't, turn the page. You're allowed to skip poems. You're allowed to skip most of them.

Third, keep the book somewhere physical and stupid-obvious. Next to the coffee maker. On the nightstand under your phone charger, so the book is between you and the doomscroll. One poem a night is three minutes. Three minutes is a habit you can actually keep for a year, and a year of that's a few hundred poems, which is more than most English majors read on purpose.

Start with poems that have plots

The fastest on-ramp for a man who reads history and thrillers is narrative verse. Something happens. Somebody does something. There's a body or a barn or a war.

**Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost.** Skip the greatest-hits and find "Out, Out—," where a boy loses a hand to a buzz saw on a Vermont farm and the poem ends with the neighbors going back to work because they aren't the one who died. Six lines from the end you'll understand what poetry can do that prose can't. Frost is dark in a way the posters never admit. He's also the most American writer on this list: farms, fences, men who don't say the thing.

**Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist (1966).** Opens with "Digging," a poem about a man watching his father work a spade in a potato field and deciding the pen is his version of the same tool. It's a son measuring himself against a father's hands. If your dad worked with his, brace yourself.

**Seamus Heaney's Beowulf (1999).** Cheating slightly, because it's a monster story with a sword in it. Heaney turned the Old English into something you can read at speed and still hear the hammer strokes. Perfect for a man who liked The Lord of the Rings and suspects poetry is soft. This one isn't soft. Mature content: it's a battle poem, so there's blood, dismemberment, and a dragon.

Then the ones about work, marriage and getting older

**Ted Kooser, Delights & Shadows.** Kooser spent his career as a life insurance executive in Lincoln, Nebraska, wrote poems before work, and won the Pulitzer for this book in 2005. Nothing he writes requires a decoder. A tattoo on an old man's arm at a garage sale. A father's tools. It's the plainest good poetry in print, and plain is harder than it looks.

**Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven.** Gilbert is the poet for a man in his forties who has buried somebody. "A Brief for the Defense" makes the argument that gladness is a duty even in a world full of suffering, that we must risk delight. It's the least sentimental case for joy I know of. Mature content: adult grief, and a frankness about marriage and loss that isn't crude but isn't for a ten-year-old either.

**Wendell Berry, This Day: Sabbath Poems.** Berry walked his Kentucky farm on Sunday mornings for decades and wrote what he saw. Marriage, soil, limits, the discipline of staying put. He's a farmer arguing for rootedness, and he's been making that argument since before it was fashionable in any direction. Read three, not thirty, or they blur.

The war shelf

Wilfred Owen. Killed in France one week before the Armistice in 1918. "Dulce et Decorum Est" ends by calling the line about how sweet it's to die for your country an old lie, and he earned the right to say it. Heavy, short, unforgettable. Mature content: graphic depictions of gas casualties.

**Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau.** Vietnam, written by a man who was there as a correspondent for the military paper. "Facing It" is about looking at your own reflection in the black granite of the Wall. If you've got a name on that wall, read it sitting down.

**Brian Turner, Here, Bullet.** Iraq, 2005, written by an infantry team leader. Mature content flag, and I mean it: profanity and violence throughout, because that's the subject. Worth it for any reader who deployed or loves somebody who did, and probably not the one to leave open on the kitchen counter.

The faith shelf, which is where the oldest poetry lives

The Psalms. Poetry before it was a genre. Read them out loud in the King James if you love the cadence, or pick up Robert Alter's 2007 translation with commentary if you want to see how hard and physical the Hebrew actually is. Psalm 22 in the morning is a serious way to start a day.

**George Herbert, The Temple.** A country parson in the 1630s writing short poems about wrestling with God and losing gracefully. "Love (III)" is about being invited to a table you don't think you deserve. Four hundred years old and still the best twelve lines on grace anybody's managed.

Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Jesuit priest who invented his own rhythm and wrote about a falcon at dawn like a man who'd just seen the front of the sky catch fire. Read "Pied Beauty" first, three times. It sounds wrong and then it sounds inevitable.

Two anthologies and a warning

Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor, collects short accessible poems chosen for reading aloud on the radio, which makes it exactly right for what you're trying to do. Poems That Make Grown Men Cry gathers a hundred picks with a paragraph from each man explaining why. Both have a few entries with language or subject matter you'd skip in front of the kids. Flip first.

The warning is Philip Larkin. Brilliant, funny, corrosive, and occasionally obscene. He'll convince you that nothing matters, and he's very good at it. Read him after you've built some ballast, not instead of building it.

The one that gets fathers

Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays." Fourteen lines. A man remembers his father getting up before dawn in the cold to light the fires, hands cracked from labor, and nobody in that house ever thanked him.

Read it to yourself tonight. Then set your alarm fifteen minutes early tomorrow, go make the coffee, and turn up the heat before anyone else is awake.