Poetry gets dismissed as difficult or inaccessible and I've been thinking about why that is. Part of it is how poetry is taught in school — as a puzzle with a correct answer, rather than as a form of attention. The goal is to decode the poem, find the theme, write the essay. This creates lifelong aversion.

What helped me was reading poets who weren't obscure about what they were doing: Mary Oliver first, because she's working in a mode (lyric observation of the natural world) that has an immediately legible emotional register. Then Ocean Vuong, who is beautiful and strange in ways that don't feel deliberately obstructed. Then Claudia Rankine, who does something I'd never seen before — poetry that reads like prose argument, that refuses easy beauty when beauty would be evasive.

The poem I recommend to absolutely everyone is 'Wild Geese' by Oliver. Not because it's her best work — it may not be — but because it's the one that makes people say, oh, I see what this is for.