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Your comment reminds me this, by Billy Collins:

  "Introduction to Poetry"

  I ask them to take a poem
  and hold it up to the light
  like a color slide

  or press an ear against its hive.

  I say drop a mouse into a poem
  and watch him probe his way out,

  or walk inside the poem’s room
  and feel the walls for a light switch.

  I want them to waterski
  across the surface of a poem
  waving at the author’s name on the shore.

  But all they want to do
  is tie the poem to a chair with rope
  and torture a confession out of it.

  They begin beating it with a hose
  to find out what it really means.

I love how you proved the essay's point even better than the actual essay, while using a poem.

You're absolutely right. Poets play with words, sounds, and ideas. And extracting the meaning shouldn't be your first aim - perhaps it should be enjoying the sound and the cadence and the imagery.

Consider the first stanza of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nighti...

A few things that you'll probably pick up with no effort at all: 1) the puzzlement of what "Lethe" is or what it even means 2) the joke of calling your mouth a "drain" 3) the cleverness of "being too happy in thine happiness" 4) the way the long third sentence keeps going and going, ending in the release of singing, just like a bird flies, sits on a branch, and sings "with full-throated ease"

At a first read, the poem is delightful to me just because it speaks of the happiness of a bird and the unhappiness of being human. The musicality is so lovely I want to memorize it, and bring it out whenever I see a bird or want to sing like one or fly like one.

And then you can read the reams of analysis people have drawn from this poem.

Your post brings to mind Christian Bök’s “Ubu Hubbub”:

https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/ubu-hubbub-10304

https://twitter.com/christianbok/status/1286894344566267907

Edit: He also likes to play around with lipograms and similar constrained writing techniques, check out “Eunoia” if you are into that: https://youtu.be/zhQjfr8b9Wg?t=39

Thanks for sharing. I don't know much about poetry, but it seems clear from this example that it's made better by being read aloud.

I laughed out loud listening to the recording. It's so grating! But very fun

> As others have mentioned, there’s also this notion pushed in our youth that poetry has to have perfect rhyme, or follow some scheme....

This is an idea that actually makes more sense in the context of poetry as play. Schemes and poetic forms are just rules you could play by, and it’s usually more fun to play by some set of rules.

This is absolutely correct, and figuring it out is what allowed me to start enjoying literature in my 20s, after hating books in school and even university due to exactly this style of teaching.

Play is so important. My own 2c is (simply) that the further prose moves from spoken word / technical detail, the closer it gets to unrestrained abstract imagination.

Everybody is constantly translating the world into brain signals, and then translating it back again to words. And some of those translations are more visceral than others, and follow natural and playful routes to reality.

Add to it overly lyrical poems that basically have nothing interesting in them for young people (or even me). Even if there is story, it is hidden behind flowery language that feels artifical. And the whole result is just drag.

I was well into adulthood when I found out that poems can be actually made fun and pleasant.