I have immersed myself in poetry recently. Reading poems, writing poems, reading about poetry and the lives of poets: Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickenson, Robert Hass, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg … also looking over contemporary poems published in the New Yorker.

I’ve concluded something.

I don’t love poetry. At least, not a lot of it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve read some gorgeous, moving, amusing, provocative poems in these past months as I’ve made a study of figurative language (with the goal of improving my writing).

But a lot of it has been a trudge through a muck of words that I’m sure mean something, but which seem (to me) to be more about linguistic strutting (“if only you were as clever, as educated, as well-read—you’d understand this obscure gibberish”) than about anything that matters. I don’t care if the literary world has proclaimed that you’re a genius. If I need a master’s degree and a stack of dusty tomes (or fifty Google searches) to understand a single stanza? Sorry. Not doing it.

What I am in love with is language.

For humans, words are the molecules of meaning and, when they are strung together just so, they combine to make a kind of living music. They manifest people, nature, longing, dread, stories, love, lust, adventure, madness, imagination … they are someone else’s dreams that we get to step into and experience with all our senses.

This might very well come in the form of a poem. But it might just as easily be a short story or novel, a screenplay or lyrics to a song.

This morning, I stumbled across one author’s lovely description of what poetry might be, written by Wallace Stevens. I’ll lift some lines.

(From “Adagia.”)

“The poet makes silk dresses out of worms.

A poem is a pheasant.

Poetry is a purging of the world’s poverty and change and evil and death.

Poetry must be irrational.

Poetry is a means of redemption.

Poetry is the joy of language.”

Yes! And one might say the same of any form of art/storytelling.

Complex, nuanced language separates us from all other creatures of Earth. (Yes, respectfully, other animals may have high levels of intelligence. Let me know when they launch a satellite into orbit or devise a mechanical heart or compose a symphony.)

We are living things contemplating life.

In one sense, we are tiny specks in the vast cosmos.

In another sense, we are that very cosmos (I believe); we are inseparable from a living universe that is the air that fills our lungs, the blood that flows through our veins, the miraculous consciousness that allows us to be aware that we aware, and (most importantly) the love that calls to us, that indwells us, that gives up hope and reason even as it breaks our hearts.

I want a slice of that … whenever and wherever I can get it.

Even in a poem.