I don’t like poetry

aka ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Poems’

I used to think:

I don’t like poetry.

I don’t really know why.

Of course, I came up with lots of reasons:

• I don’t get poetry,
• It doesn’t speak to me,
• I don’t understand it,
• It doesn’t do anything for me, and
• I don’t know any poems.

Turns out none of that is true.

In the 1990s, I spent four years doing a degree in French and chose never to study any poetry.

I then did a PhD in French literature and spent three years studying French writer André Gide. Gide’s writings spanned many genres — a diary, essays, letters, novels, plays, and poetry— and I steered away from his poetry.

In 2006 my parents gave me Palgrave’s Golden Treasury as a Christmas present. (Originally published in 1861, Palgrave’s anthology quickly established itself as the most popular selection of English poems and continues to be published in regular new editions.)
It sat on the shelf, unread.

I don’t know when I started to read poetry or to like poems.

However, a few moments stand out for me that were part of things changing for me over the past few years:

• 2019: I read Iain McGilchrist’s masterful book, ‘The Master and His Emissary’ — the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read — which led to me starting to appreciate more the perspective that the right henisphere of our brains brings to the world:

• September 2020: I had a stroke that damaged part of the right hemisphere of my brain, and I set off on a healing journey.
• Christmas 2020: Rebecca bought Dancing By the Light of the Moon: How poetry can transform your memoey and change your life, by Gyles Brandreth. As I engage with the book, I am amazed by how many bits of poems I’ve got knocking around somewhere in my memory, despite my non-interest in poetry.

• A couple of months later, and I’ve put together a list of 58 poems that are the source of those fragments, thanks in part to The Barefoot Book of Classic Poems.

• January 2021: I listen to and read Wordsworth’s ‘The Tintern Abbey Ode’ and find myself in streams of tears.
• December 2021: Reflecting at the end of the year, I decide I’d like to read more poetry.
• February 2022: I get into a habit of giving myself a daily dose of poetry — listening to or reading at least one poem a day. This is something I had toyed with doing for over a year (since being inspired by that Christmas book), but I’d never got anywhere near. The habit doesn’t lasts for very long, but it plays its part nonetheless.
• February 2022: Following a random but fortunate turn of events, I start practising meditation with Henry Shukman, who is a poet as well as a zen master.
• Having first heard her in one of Henry’s classes, I listen to writer Natalie Goldberg give a talk on haiku
• August 2022: I join Henry & poet David Whyte in an online event, Everyday Miracle: The Zen of Poetry and the Poetry in Zen.
• December 2022: I start to regularly record in my #MonthNotes the poems that touch me each month — a habit/practice I have sustained since. From this point, I find that I regularly come across poems. It feels like, from never seeing or noticing poetry and it very rarely appearing in my life, poems now regularly pop up and nudge me.
• May 2025: I host a discussion on poetry with my zen group.
  How things have changed!