Why Poems are Feared, Even by the Brightest Among Us
Investigating meterophobia - our collective fear of poetry
I have long lamented our collective meterophobia. Meterophobia is defined as the ‘irrational’ fear of poetry, and I’ve seen some of the brightest people fear poems. Guess what I found when I started investigating this cultural condition? That I haven’t been spared of it! That even after reading, writing, and teaching it, I am still a little terrified of poetry myself.
Meterophobia affects a majority - from those who vehemently hate poetry to those who like it but keep it at a distance. A few people never experience fear but are regularly baffled by the general distaste for poetry. We give up on poetry at different stages of our life. So the pronouns ‘we/our’ in this essay refer to an assortment of people.
how meterophobia develops: a timeline
We are born into poetry. Our life starts with songs and lullabies in our mother tongue, words are made rounder for our little ears, we love the repetition of sounds, our senses grasp at everything anew. For the first three years, the world is a poetic place. When we enter school, we get to enjoy nursery rhymes and tongue twisters. Our brain loves predicting the next line, and our heart loves the thumping rhythms. At this age, we can enjoy small poems, maybe in two languages, and commit them to memory without even trying.
Somewhere in middle school, the poems get bigger. It’s not enough to enjoy the rhythm, we have to find the rhyming scheme. The poets, dead white dudes, seem to have encoded a singular meaning into the poem, which according to our English teacher, needs to be decoded and noted down. We think it up ourselves or plagiarise it from somewhere. We are asked to convert 2-line dohas of Kabir, or 14-line sonnets of Wordsworth into 3 pages of prose. We are taught to destroy the weave of poetry.
Stale poetry writing assignments are handed to us once a year. These must rhyme. We struggle to find what rhymes with wolf or orange and we’re befuddled. We give up poetry for life.
Unless we are from Iran, poetry has no place in our homes. Elsewhere, the only poetic lines recited with family are religious verses. We are thought of as too old for lullabies, and too young for love poems. In India, from 10th to 12th grade, we have no time to go beyond the four poems from our board exam syllabus.
In college, poetry seems like a separate language that only some people speak. They nod and moan at the fourth line, while we are still grasping the first. We might have cracked the toughest entrance exams, but fail to understand Emily Dickinson. We look stupid for not getting it, so we pretend to. Once. Twice. Eventually, we steer clear of all things poetry.
Yet, on the side, we love rappers, we get hooked to advertisement jingles, we prefer a brand with a sound-ful name, we hum Gulzar or Adele - they sum up our relationships in 1-2 lines. As busy adults, we love brevity. We don’t always say what we mean, but we’re sure we don’t like poetry and metaphors. We feel left out of something grand, so we resent it. We decide literacy is enough, reading books is ideal, but poetry is entirely unnecessary.
We feel inadequate among intellectuals, and when we finally like one poet on Instagram, we get trolled for liking something cheap. Some of us are still interested. But we find poetry so mysterious, we feel nervous. Will I get it? Will I be able to read it until the end? In a distracted world, we find it uncomfortable to focus. Forget sonnets, even shers become tough to read on the screen.
Sometimes we get so repulsed by one kind of poetry, we give up on all of it. We despise the commodification of certain poems, the corruption of certain poets, the elitist and snooty thekedaars of poetry. We forget that genuine poetry exists.
why i avoid poetry
I have not given up on poetry, but I resist its touch. I have unconsciously declared it ‘sacred’, exalted it to a place above and afar, and not allowed it into my daily life. Some days I am too sick to read a haiku, on others my room isn’t clean enough to read a ghazal in. Sometimes I’ve watched too much trash and feel like I’ve to do a lot of repentance and penance to become the person who reads poems, the person who wears kohl and silver earrings and doesn’t stutter while reading Audre Lorde or Adrienne Rich. I don’t feel ‘that sophisticated’ today, so I procrastinate poetry to a tomorrow where I truly deserve it. Strange.
When I write, I choose prose over poetry. Prose helps me JUSTIFY my emotions. Poems ask me to JUST describe them. After writing reams of prose, when I finally write a poem, it feels like wearing a skirt after years of wearing pants. The sudden freedom is too much, and the breeze touches parts of me that haven’t been touched in a while. Here’s a poem I recently:
Is it good?
Is it good?
Is it? Oh god please be good.
That’s what my heart chants
As I uncap my pen
to write a poem on whales
and grandmothers.
Now, you don’t get that
poem on whales and grandmothers
You get a poem on scared pens
and uncapped heartsWhen I dug deeper, I realised I am not an anomaly. Ben Lerner, the poet explains in his book ‘The Hatred of Poetry’ how exclusion from poetry can threaten our humanity, for poetry is, to use Galway Kinnells’s definition, the story of what it is to be here on earth. Lerner invokes the famous poet, Marianne Moore, who started her poem Poetry, with ‘I too dislike it.’ He refers to poetry as 'An art hated from without and within.’ That poetry has been absurd, even for poets, is a comforting fact. That meterophobia hasn’t erased all poetry from our life is a testament to its power on us.
In my next essay, I will share the ways I’ve found to shed our collective resistance to poetry. Admitting that we are all, to different degrees, scared of poetry is the first step to demystifying it and re-inviting it into our lives.
Help me grow as a writer.
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