In Today’s Journal
* Why We Don’t Read Poetry
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
“I urge you to give me the few minutes necessary to read these posts even if you don’t typically read poetry.” Harvey
Why We Don’t Read Poetry
Pre-Introduction
If you stop a hundred people on the street and ask them whether they read poetry—not including the occasional greeting card—most or all of them will say No.
If you ask them why, most will say they can’t understand it.
There’s a concrete reason for that.
First, notice they won’t say they “don’t” understand it. They say they “can’t” understand it.
“Don’t” would mean they’ve tried and failed.
“Can’t” means they believe they don’t have the capacity to understand it, so they haven’t even tried. (Why bother?) That’s because someone has taught them they won’t be able to understand it.
Normal everyday people have been actively taught—or heard and accepted—that they won’t be able to understand a poem’s “meaning.” That they won’t be able to “interpret” it.
Understandably, they don’t want to attempt something at which they’re certain they will fail, so they pass on even attempting to read poetry.
But they’re missing out on some great aesthetic emotional experiences. They’re missing the chance to read what poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined as “the best possible words in the best possible order.”
Those readers are missing the opportunity to experience a literary genre in which words and phrases and raw emotion are so intimately meshed that it’s difficult to tell where the word or phrase stops and the emotion begins.
I recently offered my readers an almost-giveaway of a poetry collection (Beyond the Masks) that garnered a National Book Award nomination. I had only three takers.
That’s three out of around 240 subscribers plus everyone who read about it on X and Facebook.
A week or so ago, a friend who took me up on my offer and I were talking about poetry and its lack of popularity. I mentioned that I know exactly why poetry is so unpopular. And I do. If you’re curious, read on.
In this post and in the next few, I’ll tell you exactly why most people today shy away from reading poetry.
Back in the day—from at least the 1700s through the 1960s or so—readers were hungry for poetry.
Yet today, even in this age when owing to our shorter attention span we want shorter, quicker literary works, very few bother with reading poetry.
Beginning sometime in the 1990s and extending into the 2000s I wrote a few essays on why poetry is no longer popular.
My friend said he’d like to read those thoughts. I thought about it and decided they’d make a good short series of posts.
So in this and the next few posts I’ll talk about poetry, and specifically why so few readers seek it out. And yes, much of what I’ll say overlaps into writing fiction too.
As I wrote in the pull quote above, I urge you to give me the few minutes necessary to read these posts even if you don’t typically read poetry.
I can almost guarantee what you learn here about why readers don’t read poetry will surprise you. It’s all been a (I hope unintentional) manipulation that started, by and large, in university classrooms and soon filtered down to permeate society.
This series is a compilation of posts and essays I’ve written over the years, including the “Introduction” and “A Brief History” sections of my book, The Craft of Poetry: Structure & Sound available for $8 at my online discount store.
I’ll be back tomorrow with the introduction.
Talk with you then.
Of Interest
Do BookBub Ads Work? Tips from Successful Advertisers
[About] The Amazon A11 Algorithm
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 630
Mentorship Words…………….. 0
Total Nonfiction…………………. 630
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX
Fiction for February………………………. XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for February.…………………. 20500
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 40090
2026 consumable words………………… 40090
2026 Novels to Date……………………… 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29