The door swings open as a tall, dirty-blonde woman enters the classroom of teenagers. Her heels click on the concrete floor, but in a gentle way, like the beat to a mellow song. The chatter in the room settles, for the most part. One student sips coffee. Another giggles with her friend, probably about the goings-on of last night. Yet another sends a last-minute text and stuffs his phone in his backpack.
The woman gently sets down a stack of ten— maybe eleven—books on an empty front row desk. She always sits at the same level as her students. The boys’ and girls’ eyes linger on the titles of the books: some quite worn, and some new, with shiny spines.
Catching the Light, Joy Harjo.
Blue Horses, Mary Oliver.
The City In Which I Love You, Li-Young Lee.
Bright Dead Things, Ada Limon.
The young English teacher smiles and makes eye contact with her students, one by one. “Good Morning, everyone! How was your weekend?”
After a few minutes of small talk, the teacher clears her voice. “Okay. Today we are going to begin our poetry unit.”
Responses varied. Most of the boys groaned, or made seemingly-funny comments among each other, save for a few. Those few kept straight faces, afraid of the judgment they might receive were they to exclaim their enthusiasm, or even let out a smile.
Many of the girls smiled, but not too wide, as to not let the wall of their reputation come crashing down. Some had no qualms squealing or clapping in excitement. A couple others were too preoccupied with the reactions of the males on the other side of the room to even react themselves.
Here lies the question: why did those students suppress their excitement? Why does the idea of appreciating poetry make people feel embarrassed? Sure, teenagers are embarrassed by everything, but this answer lies beyond the walls of our high school classrooms.
Let me begin with my experience. I was a girl in this classroom. I have discovered that these uncomfortable feelings about poetry are rooted in this simple, yet oh-so-complex, idea: Guilt.
Today, we feel guilty about a lot of things. Watching netflix, junk food, shopping, etc. But why poetry?
A stigma around poetry has crept into our culture, and it lies in the cracks, not often spoken of but clearly existing. This stigma stems from many places, but we can thank the sentimental nature of the genre for much of its reputation. Here is what I mean by this: what first comes to mind when you think of a poem? Romance, right? Maybe a sad poem about someone who got their heart broken, or a dramatic love poem.
Others might argue, perhaps subconsciously, that poetry, because of its perceived level of sentimentality, is ‘girly’ or ‘feminine.’ Despite the fact that plenty of non-sentimental subcategories of poetry exist, I have noticed that people give such stereotypes a heavy weight when taking a stance on the genre. Herein may lie the reasoning behind the hesitance of some, specifically males, to indulge in poetry. Even beyond poetry, our society’s gender constructs have long-discouraged men from expressing strong emotions, especially those that have to do with weakness, such as sadness.
Now, male poets are far from nonexistent. Many of the first great American poets were male: Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Elliot, Robert Frost, the list goes on. In fact, such are the poets that we grew up reading in school. I have had “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost memorized since sixth grade. I might argue that the nature of the poetry we read in school is a reason for the stigma that surrounds much poetry today. If we were to have read more female poets, or poetry on subjects besides, say, philosophy and existence, would we still feel this guilt?
In the introduction to her book Guilty Pleasures, author Ariel Zibrak discusses the way in which stigmas around ‘feminine’ literature, specifically romance novels, have developed and infiltrated our lives as readers. She writes, “This is why so many of us find reading these books to be so pleasurable, even as we may feel ashamed of that pleasure, because so much of our world has told us that it (and we) don’t matter.”
It is possible that we are ashamed simply because the kind of poetry that interests us is not that which we believe we should be interested in. The male voice in a predominantly misogynistic society may be influencing female beliefs and telling us that on the hierarchical pyramid of literature, poetry (and romance novels) are at the base.
Zibrak continues, “In a now-infamous 1855 letter that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher… he complained, ‘America is now wholly given over to a d[amne]d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public is occupied with their trash.’” Commenting on Hawthorne’s attitude, Zibrak writes, “…while [Hawthorne] wrote a guilty pleasure novel himself, he also kind of defined the guilty pleasure genre by calling books written by women ‘trash’… he implied that the popular novels selling like hotcakes were bad not only because they had melodramatic plots about being in love and in danger…but because they were both about women and written by women.”
Over time, voices like Hawthorne’s have contributed to the establishment of gender and social constructs, such as the femininity of poetry, that try to tell us what we should or should not be doing, reading, eating, etc. and how we should feel about it.
In sum, reading and writing poetry is a guilty pleasure of mine because even in modern-day American society, those outside of the world of poetry frequently cast the genre as an emotional, insignificant, and even feminine genre, in nature. Poetry is characterized by containing predominantly romantic content and is often not taken seriously, compared to prose.
My appreciation for poetry would not be the first fun fact I share in a room full of strangers, at a job interview, or on a date. I cannot deny the fact that I sometimes do feel embarrassed about my admiration of the genre, because the world has told me that it is silly.
What society lacks in its stance on this medium of writing is that poetry of all kinds, and not just that which we are taught in school, teaches one much about themselves and the world. It is human nature to relate that which we ingest back to ourselves and our lives. This goes for poetry, too. As we read or write, we subconsciously apply the material to our own lives. I have found that the best poems describe common feelings or experiences in artistic ways that I would have never even thought to describe them. Poetry provides enlightening perspectives on mundane phenomena, opening and molding our minds.
The best poetry is rarely surface-level, which means that it is up to the reader to dig deep into each line and pull out all the good stuff, like pulling the seeds out of a pumpkin before you carve it. Poems are cryptic, puzzling, peculiar, and beautifully mysterious. In no way do they deserve to be cast aside, or labeled as insignificant, silly, or whatever else people tend to say or think. Sure, there are love poems. But there are also poems about growing up, family, social issues, nature… there are even poems about poems, like this one, by Rupi Kaur:
little poet
it seems like the more words you write
the more you think it is you writing them
why do you think you’re in control
didn’t the words come spilling
out of you the first time
pouring without permission
…
This brings up another side of the poetic stigma. Did any thoughts come to your mind when I introduced Rupi Kaur? Perhaps your subconscious began judging before you could stop it. Such is half the reason for this essay. Poet fanatics can be equally as guilty as outsiders when it comes to feeding this stigma. We have a tendency to ‘gatekeep’ the poet world by creating a hierarchy of sorts, glorifying those who read traditional, more advanced poetry and ‘ostracizing’ those whose poetic appreciation consists of authors like Rupi Kaur and Morgan Harper Nichols, who have gained recognition through social media. Perhaps this is simply a generational issue:‘Instagram poets’ reach a primarily younger audience because the bulk of Instagram users are, well, young. Meanwhile, older generations silently ridicule the youth for their poetic taste, overlooking the fact that media sources have changed.
Let me stress this, perhaps bridging the gap between the old and young: Instagram poets are real poets. If you enjoy reading Rupi Kaur or Morgan Harper Nichols (who, by the way, are wonderfully genius women and authors), you enjoy reading poetry, and you can even consider yourself a poetry person. That is your “embodied capital”—your “disposition of the mind”— as Pierre Bourdieu wrote in The Forms of Capital.
I hope you have at least begun to understand that poetry, in all its forms, is nothing but art. I hope you feel that twinge of curiosity growing inside of you. And I hope you give way to it, with absolutely no guilt.
This is just as much a reminder to myself as it is to anyone else who feels guilty for liking poetry, including the other students in that class: let the world talk. Let people judge. Let them laugh. Let society degrade art. For they will miss out on the magic. They will never know what it feels like to sit on your bedroom floor at night and be engulfed in the words, fascinated by the way meanings lurk between stanzas and wisdom dances off the page and into our hearts.