Scott Cairns was in Seattle for  the same event, though I didn’t know he was at the same hotel until he walked into the restaurant and joined our table. Although I like to think I am a pretty cool person, I have to admit I felt a little star struck at this casual ensemble, and as my three tablemates talked I mostly kept quiet and tried not to smear cream cheese on my face.

Most exciting was when the conversation turned to poetry. Kathleen and Scott talked about poets they know and have worked with, and when Scott told a joke that starred W.S. Merwin and Mark Strand in heaven, I felt like I had died and gone to…well, you know.

The truth is, even though I earned an MFA degree in poetry, I am rarely around people who read it, and am even more rarely around people who talk about it. No one knows better than poets how insular the world of contemporary American poetry is, how it needs a public revival, and needs it now.

The people I grew up around didn’t think about poetry as something someone would still write as anything other than a class assignment, and certainly not as something someone should get a degree in. In fact, once when I was still in the program and my grandmother’s pastor asked me what I was studying to be, I told him “large animal veterinarian.”

Honestly, it just came out. And although I’m sure there’s a special place in hell for people who lie to preachers, somehow it seemed less shameful than to tell him the truth: a poet.

Once I realized these people owned cattle and might call me late one evening to deliver a breech calf, I changed my answer to the vague but sensible “business.”

After graduating, living in Boston and suddenly disconnected from my workshop group and mentors, I felt the loss of having no one around with whom I could talk about poetry. My friends were great, educated, highly literate people, but poetry held no real interest for them. Once over lunch with two of them, a philosopher and a psychology student, we talked about why this might be so for most of America. I grabbed a pen and started jotting down the reasons on my napkin.

These were the top ten:

1. Because it’s hard to read.
2. Because lots of times it doesn’t make sense.
3. Because we feel like the poet thinks they are smarter than we are.
4. Because it isn’t taught well at school.
5. Because it isn’t as fun to read as stories.
6. Because it all sounds the same.
7. Because we get better emotional engagement from the music we listen to.
8. Because where do you ever see poems, anyhow?
9. Because ten times out of ten we’d rather go to the movies.
10. Because even if we did like it, we’d be embarrassed to tell anyone.

Granted, this was an impromptu, off-the-cuff list, but there are some criticisms here that are hard to ignore.

Soon afterwards I toyed around with the idea of starting a poetry advocacy group called “Poems Are People Too,” to help the public realize that poems are endangered and, like the Mediterranean Monk Seal and the ocelot, deserve our protection.

I even composed a call to action, which concluded:

Join this cause. Keep spending your Wednesday evenings at the local soup kitchen and Sunday afternoons organizing Bingo at the assisted living facility. But on Tuesdays, or Thursdays, you know, around noon or 1:45 or so, give some time to a poem. Because poems need help. And poems are people too.

Poetry isn’t a cause that can be saved with money, or politics. It takes interest and passion that begins on a personal level, and hopefully works its way into classrooms and the home and even the breakfast table. As a movement, it has to be grass roots. Walt Whitman would agree.

I know that telling this to the Good Letters readership is preaching to the choir. But I’m telling you anyway: spend some time with a poem this week. You’ll be glad you did.