John Lundberg has a piece over at Huffington Post today titled Why You Should Read Poetry…Yes, Poetry.
He begins by talking about a reading Anna Akhmatova gave in Moscow after World War II. The place was packed and the audience went wild, “When she finally closed her books, she received such thunderous applause that Joseph Stalin asked who’d organized the ovation. The man knew power when he saw it. “
The power of poets cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately these days in America poetry “is best known for the simple, sentimental verses found in Hallmark cards and the lyrics of pop music. The word “poet” probably calls to mind some weirdo in a beret.”
Lundberg, a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, then shares three reasons he often hears as to why people don’t read poetry.
1. I Never Understood It
2. I Can’t Get Past the Whole Rhyming Thing
3. Poetry is for angst-ridden teens, hopeless romantics and the aforementioned weirdos in berets.
Luckily, Lundberg gives us ways to overcome all three of these roadblocks.