Hello! :) I think that in order to fall in love with poetry and understand it better, you to need to know that poetry isn’t just “words with odd spacing.” This spacing, or line breaks, is called enjambment, and is used by poets to create more emphasis or tension in their works. Almost all poets have a good reason for breaking up their lines the way they do.
For example, if I were to write,
“She was sad,
but he loved her sadness
just as much
as he loved her,”
that would be so much more interesting than if I wrote
“She was sad, but he loved her sadness just as much
as he loved her.”
The lines that way are unbalanced, whereas in the first way they are more evenly spaced out, and there is more emphasis placed on the “just as much” part.
So the “odd spacing” is honestly something you’ll just have to learn to deal with and maybe even appreciate!
To understand poetry better, it’s also necessary to inspect the use of figurative language within a poem. What is the writer trying to get across in a specific simile or metaphor? Why did they choose that simile or metaphor? If you can figure that out, you’re a whole lot closer to understanding the poem.
It’s also important to remember that not every single poem has a deeper or hidden meaning. For example, the other day in my creative writing class we were doing a poetry workshop, and we read a student’s poem about snow. Several of the workshop members read too deeply into the poem, and said that the part about the snowflakes falling into a dark sky was meant to symbolize the contrast between darkness and light, or good and evil.
But after the workshop was over, the poet revealed that the poem was just about snow! That was it! As Freud once said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
So some poems are as simple as you think they are. Poems don’t have to be deep. And maybe that’s something that’s made it hard for you to understand poetry-maybe you analyze it too much, when it’s really just a “surface” poem; there’s not as much depth as you’d think.
Also, poetry is really similar to song lyrics. If you understand those, just imagine the poem playing along to music! That might help. Poems have a certain rhythm, too.
But most importantly, find out what kind of poetry you like and dislike. It’ll be a lot easier to fall in love with poetry if you know what you like. Read different styles-slam poetry, confessional poetry, haikus, free verse, sonnets, etc, until you find ones you like.
If you like my style of poetry, maybe some other poets you might enjoy are Buddy Wakefield, Andrea Gibson, Sierra DeMulder, Bob Hicok, Gregory Sherl, Rudy Francisco, etc.
Enjoy! I hope that helped you somewhat! xo