I don’t get poetry.
Never have, really. On paper, it’s the kind of thing I should be into. I’m an avid fan and creator of fiction and music, and I have a degree in literature and philosophy that included a fair bit of poetry study. So I can explain some of the techniques poems use to do poetry things. It’s just exceedingly rare that I actually… get them.
I hear people talking about what poetry makes them feel, what it does for them and brings to their lives, and I think that sounds like a pretty cool thing to have going for you.
So, like any lazy numpty in the Internet age, I want to crowdsource this. I’m putting the call out: help me understand poetry.
Chris Doesn’t Get Poetry is going to be a podcast with short episodes (under 15 minutes, maybe even less), in each of which I hear from someone about a poem they love, what poetry means to them, and just what it is about their chosen poem that they get – the bit that makes them respond to it in the way I’ve never managed to.
There’s a trailer up now on the RSS site, where episodes will be uploaded going forwards. In theory, this should also add them to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and whatnot. We’ll see how that goes.
Help me get it!
Here’s my request: please email me at chrisdurstoncreator@gmail.com with the subject line You Should Get Poetry and the following things:
- Your name as you’d like to be credited in the episode. Feel free to also include any links to your own work, whatever kind of work that might be, if you want some free promotion.
- Your chosen poem – please include either a link to somewhere I can read it on the Internet or a picture of it in the pages of a book. I want to be able to see it with the original formatting, punctuation, etc.
- An audio clip (either attached to the email or as a link to a hosting site; it can be video if you like but this is going to be a primarily audio format), less than five minutes long, in which you:
- State your name and where you’re from, followed by the words, “and I want to tell you why you should get poetry”.
- Tell me what you think poetry is. What makes something uniquely and definitively a poem, rather than just some nice prose? What does poetry do that nothing else does? What’s the one thing that defines poetry, identifies it, sets it apart? Heck, what has it done for you? That kind of thing.
- Read your chosen poem, or an excerpt if it’s a long one.
- Give me a couple of examples of things that your poem does that just work for you, that make you get it or feel something. The more specific, the better!
FAQs
What will the format of the episodes look like? – I’ll be figuring it out as I go, but I suspect the basic structure is that I’ll play your audio including your poem and explanation, then spend a little bit of time reflecting and responding to what you’ve submitted and seeing whether I feel something about it. But to be clear, the audio clip you send will be played in the show, so your voice will be on air.
I really don’t want to speak aloud, but I want to be involved. – No worries. I’d rather as many people do talk as are comfortable with it, but if you want to send something in a written format for me to read out, I can make that work.
Can I send you a poem I wrote myself? – Sure!
How do you feel about AI-generated things? – I would like to kick them into the moon. Please don’t send me anything written by AI. I’ll cry.
What sort of poems are you looking for? – Anything, seriously. I would love to just feel some of that feeling people seem to have when they talk about what poetry means to them, and I obviously haven’t found some that works for me yet, so I want a wide range of things. (If you’re curious, I suspect I’m more likely to vibe with things that have quite a defined metre or structure; free verse and stuff that sounds like prose with some extra line breaks usually makes me roll my eyes, but if you think you can convince me, go for it!)
Are there really no poems you like? – Ehhhhhhh. I like Paradise Lost, I like plenty of song lyrics, and there are one or two Emily Dickinson ones that have stuck with me a bit, but I still don’t think any poem has ever made me feel what people who are into poetry seem to feel.
Why are you doing this as a podcast? – Because I’m terminally internet-brained to the degree that I can only do anything if it’s ~*content*~. Also because I went looking for podcasts to help me get poetry, but every poetry podcast I found seems to sort of assume you already know how to receive poetry and feel its intended impact. It’s entirely likely I’ll do a couple of episodes and then drop it anyway.
Chris Durston 