Why Don't More Teens, like, omg LOVE Poetry?

     I remember in high school when our English classes would begin poetry units, many of my classmates would groan in misery. Poetry was considered inaccessible, boring, and pointless. When my husband spent a year teaching Freshman and Senior English at his alma mater, he seemed to have a similar experience with his students.
     I'm so confused by this phenomenon. These are the same humans who will listen to one song on repeat all day for a week because the lyrics, like, so sum up how they are feeling. I can probably summarize my emotional journey throughout my four years of high school using the lyrics of maybe twenty songs, all of which I listened to incessantly at some point between fall of 2000 and spring of 2004.
     This explains the success of artists like Taylor Swift, who despite being a country artist, has massive trans-genre appeal. She captured this level of success not by being the best singer or songwriter in the world, but by telling teenagers' stories. Her songs are generally sweet and clever or sassy and vindictive, but they are always young and relevant. Teenagers love her.
     Teenagers' emotions are amazing things. They are thinly walled, tremulously controlled, and passionately volatile. One could say the same thing for the emotions conveyed in basically any form of art. Like musical lyrics, though, poetry is one of the few forms of art that conveys these emotions through words. Many times English words. That you can read. Out loud if need be.
     This is inaccessible how? I understand that some poetry is rife with complex metaphor or antiquated language and to a poetic beginner might as well be in a foreign language, but much of it is not. Many poems are just as straight forward and just as lovely, or vindictive, or sassy as a Taylor Swift song.
     Just as I still have songs that I fell emotionally in love with during high school, I still have many favorite poems that grabbed me at that age. I am not saying this to make myself sound better or smarter or more versatile or worldly or arty than anyone else. I'm saying this because I wish more young people could have the kind of relationship with poetry that I had at that age.
     There are poems out there that can mend hearts, inspire boldness, and save lives. (There are also many, many, many poems to break a heart, but no matter.)  There are poems to fill the massive, seething voids that teenagers sometimes find in themselves. Given recent news full of bullying and teen suicide, it seems that some void filling is in order. So if you are a teenager, please give poetry a chance. If you know some teenagers, buy them a simple volume or two for their birthdays. You never know when a stanza or two might fix someone.

This is a poem-a-day website run by the Library of Congress and specifically aimed at teenagers: http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
 

A love story for someone's parents' 30th anniversary

     I once had a fever so severe that no one could say with any certainty whether I would live or die. My father was an anthropology man, and we were living in a place with lovely people who did not speak a word of my language, and a pack of gangly dogs who begged for scraps, and far too many mosquitoes. I was nine years old.
     A woman in a brightly colored shawl came to see me during one of my bouts of foggy consciousness, and she lay hands on me and spoke in a mumbling, lilting tongue that made me feel as if she were a sorcerer from a Disney film. Afterwards, I heard my parents arguing loudly outside of our 3 room shack. My mother was accusing my father of witchcraft and false hopes while my father rebuked her, gently, humbly, but with a vague threat of limited tolerance.
     The shack was charming in its own way, full of mosquito nets and clay pots. It suited us fine, with my parents sleeping on a pair of cots in one room while I slept in the room that acted as whatever it needed to be to suit our moods. There was a fairly inviting outhouse, as far as outhouses go, and a spacious kitchen with a wood stove and an oven. An ice box kept the limited meat we could find cold. We often ate with the locals who dined on bizarre things like insects and frogs, but sometimes my father would drive to town in his 1961 Jeep and come back with a leg of lamb or even some steaks.
     I lay on my living room cot and stared at a mosquito net, sweating so profusely that I could feel the liquid pooling in the small of my back. It had been days since I could draw a clear distinction between wakefulness and sleep, but my parents' voices, moving in and out of earshot, were sucking me into a very clear reality.
    "--never been here in the first place!" my mother snarled.
    "No one asked you-- couldn't stay-- good for her anyway," my father replied in an even tone brimming with unreleased viciousness.
    "--Tommorow!" my mother finished before her angry footsteps faded away.
    "Good luck getting her on a plane in this state," mumbled my father to himself as he entered the shack. He spotted my open eyes and came to sit beside my cot. He folded his legs under himself and brushed my hair from my eyes.
     "You're awake," he said. "How do you feel?"
     "Better, a little, I think," I responded. My father wiped hair from my forehead again, and his hand came away dripping.
     "I can tell what's real now," I told him.
     "I guess you heard your mom and me out there, huh?" my father said.
     "I don't want to leave," I said. "I can't go home without you."
     "You won't need to," my father told me. "Your mom is scared, that's all."
     "Scared of what?" I asked.
     "Of losing you," he said, simply, while wrapping a coil of my long, blond hair around his wrist. "She couldn't live without you."
     "She loves me a lot," I said.
     "She does, and so do I."
     "You could live without me, though," I insisted.
     "I couldn't," my father replied. "I couldn't even when your mom asked me to. That's why you're here. I couldn't leave you, so I convinced your mom to come here with you, and oh god--" He was sobbing now. He buried his face in my hair and cried. "I'm sorry," he heaved. "I'm so, so sorry."
    "Dad?" I said. He sat up and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
    "What baby?" he asked, his voice sounding all weird and wobbly from crying.
    "Go tell mom," I said.
     And he did.