I’m sorry to say that April is National Poetry Month, as if poetry needs an awareness campaign. As with many things in America today, poetry is sinking to the lowest common denominator, lacking meaning and sound, and celebrating writers for their fame and less for their talent.

How many times have you read a poem in the last year and said to yourself, “What? I don’t understand”. Often the reason you don’t get it is because there’s nothing to achieve but a bunch of words stacked in broken lines with disjointed images created for a supposed depth effect when, in reality, the work is a pretentious mess.

Much of today’s modern poetry is compared to modern art: it exists to dazzle, to surprise, to provoke a reaction from the public and the reaction is quite good, even if the poetry is second rate.

Doing an honest critique of current poetry is like trying to say that Babe Ruth was a terrible baseball player. Babe Ruth was not a bad player, and we all know it because we have proof: his statistics. If you say a poem is lousy, people will say, “Poetic taste is subjective. Who are you to judge?” Anyone can write a poem. Few write poetry.

To judge the quality of a poem is to read plenty of poetry. The more you know, the more you know. The more poetry (statistics) you accumulate, the better you will judge the quality of what you are reading.

If you’ve never had apple pie before, your first slice is sublime, but after years of trying different pies, you have a much better taste for what’s delicious.

My 5 year old grandson loves the color and shape of dandelions. He chooses them every time he gets the chance. When his parents took him to the New York Botanical Garden, he was dazzled.

The same goes for poetry: there are people who write poems about dandelions and people who write poems made from lavender fields.

If you want to learn how to find quality poems, you need to educate yourself. Let’s start with the poetry of Walt Whitman, who almost single-handedly helped us break away from the boring, pretentious traditions of rhyme schemes and sonnets while using vivid imagery and common language. Listen to the sounds he made with sentences and how he used all the tools of poetry and not just isolated formats. Listen as he speaks to the voice of the mechanics and carpenters at work:

I hear America sing, the various Christmas carols I hear,

Those of the mechanics, each one singing their own thing as it should be happy and strong,

The carpenter sings his while measuring his board or beam,

The bricklayer singing his while getting ready to go to work or when he leaves work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him on his ship, the sailor singing on the deck of the steamboat

Then read the calm voice of Emily Dickinson:

“Hope” is that thing with feathers –

That settles in the soul –

Read poems by Dr. William Carlos Williams that he wrote between patient visits, poems that use concrete images and simple language mixed with compassion:

I will show you my inhabitants.

how to hold a funeral

because you have it on a troop

of artists –

Listen to the plaintive cries of Anne Sexton, “I am a collection of dismantled cassis,” and Kenneth Rexroth, “Thinking of you burdened with loneliness,” and Sylvia Plath, “I am terrified of this dark thing sleeping within me. “

Let Mary Oliver tell you about the dry seed fields and the sparrows. Delight in the poetry of Li-Young Lee, then study poet and philosopher Wallace Stevens “Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”

Finally, when you read the sensual, exact and passionate Pablo Neruda, then you will be ready to notice the difference between a poem that is a dandelion and a poem that is a rose. “I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees.”

Poetry is not a trick or a way to imitate Shakespeare. Poetry does not seduce or spit, nor does it find its way to the ocean and collect shells.

Poetry is not your mother, nor the taste of your first kiss. Poetry is not sentimental, nor royal, it is not made for academics, nor for their interpretations.

Poetry is a single word in the dark. Poetry gathers daffodils at dusk. Poetry is what remains when there is death.

They say that a poem cannot conquer a nation. It depends on which nation: the nation of America where we are all citizens and we are looking for a single chair on the beach where we can play with our children and build sand castles.

Poetry is a letter to the gods, asking them to teach us how to dance.

Too often poetry today is judged not by the quality of the poem, but by the claim for publication and by the barks and howls of the writer’s reputation.

A secret. Shhh. Bob Dylan is not a good poet.

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