New goal: read poetry

I won't be trying a new thing today, but I do have a goal: to read a complete book of poetry. If I did this in college, I've blocked it. Poetry has always been opaque to me. I just don't seem to understand poems other than the basic famous ones like Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." But I'll give it one more try.

Billy Collins came to mind first, as I heard him read a selection of his poems a couple of years ago in Jackson Hole and enjoyed them very much. In fact, I've liked the poems Garrison Keillor has recited on NPR, so maybe hearing poetry is the best way for me to appreciate it. But my mind is made up: I plan to read "Elephant Rocks," a book of poems by Kay Ryan.

I confess Ryan appeals to me largely because her poems are short. But she's also the country's Poet Laureate right now, which makes her seem to-the-moment. Plus, my interest was piqued by Megan O'Rourke's review of Ryan's work in "The Highbrow" section of Salon.com.

O'Rourke wrote, "And yet it's hardly a surprise that the Library of Congress tapped her. Ryan rejects the pained, stylized self-consciousness that characterizes so much contemporary poetry. Where many poets today are engaged in issues and questions that would be meaningful mainly to other practitioners of the art, Ryan's concerns about the nature of reality are relatively translatable to a general audience."

I am definitely in the "general audience" category. Now onto the poetry.