You don’t hear much about poetry in today’s culture. It’s like the American public thinks modern poetry is esoteric, self-aggrandizing and for the most part, pointless. The American public could not be more right.

This pains me. Despite being the walking cliché of the middle-age, middle-class, televised sports-obsessed, red meat-burning, Sasquatch-sized carbon foot-printing American, I love poetry. Let me qualify that: I love good poetry.  Still, my love of poetry goes so against my character type it’s like a nun being into death metal.

That’s not to say I can’t bring my general boorish attitude to the world of poetry. A precisely constructed, metrically lyrical work of poetry can get me fist pumping like a drunken sports fan on nickel beer night.

Shoot, a sublime insight into the human condition brilliantly composed, so subtle that even the sub-text has sub-text and still has me thinking while trying to figure out why the disposal is making a weird metal-on-metal scraping sound and then suddenly have me chest bumping a very confused and agitated wife trying to do the dishes.

But not many poets are into such things these days. And I’m talking about actual professional poets who get paid, though I always imagine when they write “poet” on their tax forms, the IRS writes back with “No, seriously, how do you make a living, Rhymy McPoety?”

These are supposed to be highly trained professionals as opposed to pubescent girls whose poetry I am exposed to at a disturbing degree. I don’t know what biological need is fulfilled by writing incredibly self-centered, hyper-emotional bad poetry, but as young ladies hit a certain stage of maturation, the question I dread most as a high school English teacher is, “Can you read my poetry and tell me what you think?”

It just leads to lots of pretend reading, saying meaningless things like “interesting” and “I can feel your emotions,” and unbecoming lying.

Yet these fully matured folks are still writing a lot of inexcusable drivel.  Every week, I crack open my “New Yorker,” read all the cartoons (some of them I even get), peruse the titles of the articles I want to read (20,000 words on cheese graters, Yes!!!), and then read the poems. Or at least I think they’re poems.

They look like poems with all the white space around them, but there’s not a lot of rhyming, meter or even poetic devices. Just seems like poorly spaced prose.  As a matter of fact, if I squeezed in the margins of this paragraph, I could submit it as a poem.

Now if you are a modern poet (but really, what’s your real job), you’re probably scoffing at my philistine lack of appreciation for free form and experimentation. And if you follow form, you’re also probably drinking coffee and writing a poem about what you see out your kitchen window. Enough already – no one cares.

Occasionally, I’ll stumble on one that has a rhyme scheme and some semblance of meter and get all excited. But then the nonsense talk starts, I’ll think I’m not getting it and then spend several minutes trying to find a plausible interpretation.

“Okay, the reference to William Harrison seems to be a yearning for a return to the Gilded Age, which is kind of weird. But why is his love compared to an ironing board in a swamp filled with manic-depressive possums throwing me off.  And what’s the deal with the sad clown eating a ham sandwich? Sigh….”

Here’s an actual line from a poem a couple of weeks back: “What a joy to eat the unborn. We’re monsters, I fear. What monsters were.” What does that even mean?  In context, I think it’s about eating caviar. Or maybe the ‘62 Mets. Who knows?

For some reason, I still go to the occasional poetry reading thinking hearing it from the horse’s mouth might help. Actually, now that I think about it, never been to a horse’s reading, but it would probably make about as much sense.

Folks will tell you that poetry is supposed to heard, not read, but it’s usually the people who are in the poem reading business who tell you this. Though a lot of times I think it’s supposed to be stand-up, but it’s not funny, so it’s “spoken word.”

But modern poets have gotten into the habit where their performances are all pretty much the same, regardless of the subject matter. So here is the perfect modern poem:

“The first line is said softly, almost in a whisper

Thensaythesecondlinerealfast!!

Then pause……scan the room with your eyes building suspense

And inexplicably SHOUT a word that really doesn’t need to be emphasized

Take on an exaggerated character dialect, preferably old and/or country

And slowly let your voice fade out…….thank you.”

So if I feel such disdain for modern poetry, why do I keep reading it? Let me just say that’s an excellent question and I really like your new haircut.

I keep searching week after week because I know he or she is out there, the next George Herbert or Matthew Arnold or TS Eliot (pre-Nazi sympathies). If I have to read a bunch of gibberish about toothbrushes, dead seagulls and Ernest Borgnine as symbol or patriarchal dominance, so be it.