I’ve been spending time with David Orr’s book on poetry, “Beautiful and Pointless.” He has a chapter on form, which provides a brief history of poetic structure. Essentially, he describes a gradual move away from formal tradition, which was heavy in meter, syllable count, and often rhyme. The present state of poetry is a grab-bag of poets practicing along the spectrum between free verse and traditional forms.

I have had a love-hate relationship with poetry over the past decade. Reading contemporary poetry in particular often puts me in a bad mood. While reading some free verse, I question why it is not prose. The language can be extremely confusing, as if the point was frustrating one’s understanding. Whereas reading fiction has several clear benefits - cultivation of empathy, exercising the imagination, taking a vacation in the mind - poetry has felt to me somewhat sadistic.

After reading Orr’s history of form, I went back to older poets: Yeats, Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens, Thom Gunn, even Shakespeare. These poets use clear meter, often pay close attention to syllable counts of a line, and may rhyme. A Yeats poem is unambiguously a poem. Reading these poets train rhythmic attention. I began automatically reading the lines with accentuated meter.

After reading poetry in this way, returning to fiction meant my mind had to switch modes. But there was a transition period where I read prose like it had meter. That is not necessarily wrong. Some fiction writers are lyrical, and their language and rhythm can fall in to meter. As a side benefit, reading fiction with attention to sound is one tool to combat reading stagnation. I often get stuck in books because I get confused by the ideas or lost in the plot. Letting the sound take center stage helps get back into the flow of the narrative.

But really the benefit of reading the older poets is the effect on modern poetry. After Yeats and Dickinson switched my brain into meter-mode, the meter of the modern poets begins to pop out. I’ve returned to Tracy Smith, Saed Jones, Ocean Vuong, and Richard Silken with a new appreciation for their rhythms. Smith mixes trochees and dactyls with iambic feet so well. I’m not super well versed in technical poetic terms, but I can tell that these poets all have a finely tuned sense of their words’ rhythm. I hear this in Danez Smith, a poet I just started reading. He sometimes sounds iambic: “to make the rent, the lights, to eat, to hand” (1). Smith and the rest I mentioned are writing free verse with a rhythm that is rich and varied.

Paying attention to the rhythm and sound pacifies my frustration. It deescalates the need to understand everything. And when the stakes are lower, I find I end up understanding more. I come to appreciate the poet’s voice, and receive their ideas more readily. I see these poets hold uniquely radical opinions, which is a fun juxtaposition against the stereotype of the meek poet.

(1) A line from Danez Smith’s poem ‘Queen Performing “And I’m Telling You I’m not Going” in a Blue Dress, Saloon Bar, Minneapolis, 07/2022’ which appears in his 2024 collection, “Bluff”.