Non-Readers of Poetry: What’s in it for Me?

Most non-readers of poetry complain that “reading poetry is effortful,” according to the Poetry Foundation’s 2006 Poetry in America Survey. And yet fewer than half of non-poetry readers consider it a waste of time, and more than half of them agree poems “help you appreciate the world around you...make you laugh... help you understand other people...provide comfort at difficult times.” (Executive Summary, page iii.)

What makes it 'effortful', I submit, is the lack of reward for those readers — the lack of pleasing artistry poets put into their work. There’s little to please the ear or the eye, or the craving for sophisticated rhythm like that which draws youngsters to hard rock concerts, or others to symphony orchestras, jazz, and soft rock. Readers will gladly expend effort if rewarded.

It’s true that good free verse employs alliteration, assonance, and consonance to furnish lyric notes, and rhetorical repetition that offers foreground rhythm. But there is no background rhythm without meter, without structural corner posts flagged with rhyme to mark the rhythm of individual lines as each turns (verse literally means turn). Much of the pleasure in formal poetry is speech-stress running counter to metrical stress. This contrapuntal pleasure is absent in free verse even for the out-loud- or lip-reader.

Indeed, what is the reward for the poet who writes with less music than is available? Neither readers nor poets of non rhyming, non metrical work experience the full underlying incantatory power found in formal work. Free verse offers considerably less reward as art on a subliminal and subconscious level. Without this power, this reward, what’s in it for the reader?

So who’s responsible? I think we, the poets, are. You? Please comment, pro or con.

Leland