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/