"Why I Write Poetry for People Who Think They Hate Poetry"

Guest post by Jason McBride of Weirdo Poetry

I am pleased to bring you a guest post by Jason McBride, who writes and illustrates the newsletter Weirdo Poetry.

Why I Write Poetry for People Who Think They Hate Poetry

Don’t let miserable school experiences ruin the most extraordinary form of storytelling known to humans.

by Jason McBride

Out the window above my desk, the waxing crescent Moon is rising. It looks like a juicy slice of the blood oranges my wife’s aunt serves us whenever we visit her in LA. 

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have a new season. Wedged between summer and fall is wildfire season. The smoke pouring into my valley from several surrounding fires is giving the Moon its peculiar tint tonight. 

But it’s not all bad. The layers of toxic smoke from the climate change induced fires have blocked the sun and prevented the climate change induced heat dome, which was supposed to settle down on us this week and send temperatures spiking to over 100 for multiple days for the second time this summer. Instead, it was only in the 90s for most of the week. 

Thanks to surge of Delta-variant COVID cases, the mask mandates are back here, and the masks do a decent job of filtering the smoke in the air for short periods of time in addition to working decently to protect us from the virus. 

My sixteen-year-old has a severe anxiety disorder. Today she asked me what the point of anything was since the world is literally burning. She senses she is living through a collapse. 

She is why I write poetry—or at least one of the reasons. 

If you went to public school in the United States, you likely suffered through a few units of what I call “Five Dead White Guys and Emily Dickinson.” You were told it was a poetry unit. 

You had to learn archaic English terms about agriculture. You were made to decode poems written before your grandparents were born—poems that might as well have been written by Martians about the majestic Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system.

You learned that poetry sucked. 

It was boring, inscrutable, and irrelevant. 

You got screwed. 

I’m not here to slag on the Five White Guys and Emily Dickinson. (The five white guys that form the core of almost all high school poetry units are William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, and Edgar Allan Poe, if you’re lucky.)

They are all excellent poets. But they weren’t writing for 21st-century people. 

Poetry isn’t sacred. 

It’s better. 

Poetry is story. 

Poets write about stuff that matters most to them. They write to the people of their time. If you want to really hear what poetry can sound like when it’s written by people who understand the world you live in, you could do worse than tuning into Kendrick Lamar or even Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. 

If I could wave a magic wand, I would change the high school poetry curriculum to include Tracy K. Smith’s collection Life on Mars. It’s beautiful. 

On the surface, it’s written as an homage to David Bowie. When you read her poems, you understand all the words because it’s written for you. As you read, you feel the stories she is telling. You don’t need a decoder ring to figure out she’s writing about her relationship with her father, a man who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. 

You haven’t always hated poetry. 

You used to love it. 

When you were a child, you loved Dr. Seuss. What is Cat in the Hat if not poetry preserving? And what about Shel Silverstein? Uncle Shel—at least that’s what I secretly called him. Seeing his big bearded face on the back of Where the Sidewalk Ends frightened and delighted me because I felt he was inviting me to mischief. Silverstein’s poems were fun stories that mattered to his audience—to kids—to you. 

Chances are, in elementary school you learned about haiku. You learned to write three lines of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables. You had fun making your tiny poems. Nobody worried if they were “good” or not. I’m willing to bet that was the last time you thought poetry writing and reading was fun.

School soon killed the joy of it for you. 

We have always told stories. All the oldest stories were poems. Poems predate written language. Epic poems had to be memorable because people had to remember them. There were no books, scrolls, or stone tablets. Stories like Beowulf and The Odyssey were poems. They meant something to the people who spoke them and the people who listened to them.

In the United States, we have corrupted poetry into some quasi-religious practice where only priestly academics are allowed to participate in the sacred rites of verse. 

But real poetry is subversive. There are no rules in poetry. You don’t have to rhyme. You don’t need meter. All you need is message. 

Poetry is like any other type of writing. If the message isn’t obvious, it isn’t that the reader is stupid. It’s that the writer didn’t do a good job. 

Don’t get me wrong. Poetry is full of symbolism and hidden meanings. But a good poem uses language to make you feel something and understand something on the first read-through. 

I want to bring back poetry to its storytelling roots. I write poetry to tell stories that matter to me. I write about vampires, zombies, time machines, AI, wildfires, smartphones, and DoorDash because that’s the language of the world I inhabit. 

I often combine poems with abstract art to create poetry comics because we live in a visual time. Shakespeare didn’t sell book versions of his plays and sonnets because his audience was illiterate. 

My audience first encounters my work on the web. I want it to look enticing and intriguing. Poetry and comics are both about telling stories with images. 

We may be living through an era of collapse. I may not be able to stop the virus, put out the fires, or alter the climate by myself. But if I can help other people to find a little pop of emotion in a short poem that makes them look at the world a bit differently or just gives them a moment of distraction from the apocalypse, I will have lived a useful life. 

The Moon is hidden now. Clouds or smoke or both have blotted it out. But I know it’s still up there, waiting for another chance to shine through the haze. 

I know inside of you is still the child who loved Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstein or writing haiku. A love of poetry is encoded in your human DNA—it’s just waiting for a chance to shine again. 

Read a poem today by someone still alive. If you don’t know where to start, try Tracey K. Smith, or email me. I’d love to help you reignite the spark that carried our ancestors from the cave campfires to the Moon.