Why Poetry

Simple question meet simple answer—at last! It just took 10 years.

May 13, 2025

Currently challenging myself to write about the push-and-pull of creativity and entrepreneurship; art vs capitalism; artistry vs product for 30 days.

If this is something you’re thinking about, then I want to hear from you!!

thunderstorm with dark clouds — Photo by Josep Castells on Unsplash

In 2012, I dated a very nice guy who researched cancer by day and dedicated himself to a popular MMORG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) at night. He owned several books, reserved a weekend each month to play a table-top version of the game, and painted figurines. None of this bothered me. His nerdy passions didn’t consume his life, and I knew enough popular scifi/fantasy nerdspeak to talk to him about it.

That’s how I noticed what we didn’t speak about. We never discussed my main nerd obsession: poetry.

It’s not like he didn’t know I loved it. We met because of the MFA program in creative writing where I currently was enrolled and struggling through my poetry thesis. He kindly understood that I needed lots of solitude each week to wrack up writing and reading hours. But he never asked me about it, and I rarely talked to him about it.

Like, I never said: “OMG! I just read this great poem. Let me tell you about it!”

Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that the root issue was quite simple: He didn’t know how to talk to me about it, and I had no idea how to talk to him about it.

At this point in my life, I knew there was a gap between how non-writers perceived and talked about writing vs. how writers did. I’d also recently learned that it was crucial to close it.

Before I enrolled in graduate school, I earned a degree for graphic design. The classes were at night and filled with students looking to change their careers. Many of the professors were active professionals during work hours. But once or twice a week, they stepped out of their agencies to talk very eloquently about why creative, graphic and visual design mattered not only in the workplace but in life at large.

When they talked, the entire class leaned forward. It was so easy to see them pitching million-dollar ideas to clients and succeeding. Then they made their words tangible through the tactics and processes taught in class. I was constantly struck by this. Because while I saw the parallels between design and writing constantly, I’d never been in an English or writing class where teachers so concisely, passionately and consistently laid out the practical applications of how this knowledge meant you could drive companies and teams to innovative outcomes let alone use it to power a career.

I decided to try the tactics for myself on a problem I kept encountering at my pre-MFA job. For three years, I kept having the same fruitless conversation over and over again. It went something like this:

General Human Being: What’s your job?
Me: I’m a book editor!
General Human Being: How cool! So … you like proofread and stuff?
Me: No.

Conversation over.

From my design teachers, I knew this was an elevator pitch gone completely wrong. An elevator pitch is the idea that you should be able to deliver the overview and value of an idea—no matter if it’s a movie script or startup value proposition—during the span of an elevator ride, i.e. 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Your aim is to elicit interest in your proposal. You want to prolong the interaction with the person to whom you are talking because they may have power to help make your idea a reality. Thus, a well-delivered elevator pitch has a lot of power. Whereas a poor one just shuts everything down.

So I worked and practiced my book editing pitch for over a year, and I succeeded!

General Human Being: What’s your job?
Me: I’m a book editor.
General Human Being: How cool! So … you like proofread and stuff?
Me: Not exactly. Have you ever practiced a sport or musical instrument before?
General Human Being: Yes! In high school, I did track [or whatever answer applies].
Me: Well, I’m like your coach except for how to write a book.
General Human Being: Oh! I get it!

And the conversation then often continued with great animation!

So I decided that if I could figure it out there, then I could certainly unravel the elevator pitch for poetry. Then like my boyfriend who could so easily explain why he liked online gaming, I also would be able to express and share my undying devotion to poetry.

I started practicing my elevator pitch. First, I stopped self-destructive habits. Such as if a person asked what kind of writer I wanted to be, I stopped saying: “One who writes with words. In English. Preferably sentences.” Instead, I actually told them about my poetry thesis.

Then, I conducted market research. Whenever possible, I’d tell people point-blank that I read and wrote poetry. Or, I’d ask people if a) they ever read poetry for fun, and b) what the reason behind their answer might be.

The data was intriguing.

For example, at a summer barbecue, a new acquaintance asked: “What are you reading for fun?”
“Poetry,” I said.
“Huh,” he replied. “I just never really thought about that as an option.”

Another example: I was at a work lunch with my boss to discuss some design concepts. Because he knew I was in grad school, he asked after my writing, and I told him about my elevator pitch problems.

“Do you read poetry?” I asked him.
“Not really,” he said. “I guess I just think I need to make time for it. So I understand what I’m reading.”

I was heartened by every interaction. I saw a world that was receptive to the value of poetry; it just didn’t know how to engage with it.

Then that summer, I attended three poetry readings that left me so stunned I haven’t been able to formulate a coherent thought on the subject until this year—more than a decade later.

The first part of each reading—when the poet performed their poetry—was beautiful. With each verse, the audiences of up to 100 people leaned in to catch every delicious word. I also want to add that each of the three poets across the readings were very well-known and highly decorated. Their full-time job was “poet.” They taught, wrote, and represented poetry from a national to international level.

The terrible part happened in the Q & A. That’s when the audience is invited to stand up, take a mic, and speak to the poet. In each of these readings, one person asked this question:

“I have never been to a poetry reading before, and I didn’t know poetry could make me feel like this. How do I experience this again?”

black microphone with stand — Photo by Redd Francisco on Unsplash

Looking back on this question from the vantage point of someone who’s now designed digital products and services for 10 years, I can tell you this is a million-dollar, golden-ticket moment. Companies ideate services and test them out on regular people hoping for even a shadow of something like this—a person feeling so moved by an experience that they raise their hand to publicly ask to subscribe to future updates NOW.

But then the lauded, world famous poets gave three of the most disappointing and terrible answers I’ve ever heard in my entire life. They were:

1) “Just read more poetry! Can you imagine how much people would value poetry more if everyone bought 10 books each year?”

2) “You probably like my poetry because it’s like hiphop.”

3) “I don’t try to convince people to like poetry anymore.”

What do you say to that?!

In the aftermath, I ended up talking to a cousin who works in sales.

“I think poetry just doesn’t have an elevator pitch,” I said. Then I shared the three disappointing examples.

“If they had been my employees,” he said, “I would’ve reprimanded or fired them. But creative types are like that. They don’t understand marketing. I would have told the people asking questions: ‘I’d like to continue exploring this in a focus group.’ ”

“But that doesn’t give them what they’re looking for,” I said. I thought of those three people bravely standing in a spotlight, putting a question so full of vulnerability and optimism to the floor, then being dismissed by the Beyonce, Michelle Williams and Kelly Rowland of poetry. They would never try again. I was certain.

Then my cousin said: “Questions like that tell me people don’t know where poetry is and what it does. For me, I thought it was something that only existed in places like presidential inaugurations.”

That’s when I realized how big the gap really was between my ex-boyfriend’s obsession and mine. I knew how his hobby permeated his life. But he couldn’t even comprehend how much poetry affected mine nor was I able to tell him.

Words were my life and passion. I was going to school to learn how to wield them in beautiful, innovative and unexpected ways. But I had no examples on how to share what that meant with others succinctly; not even the masters could tell me.

More than ten years pass. In that time, I still continue to stitch poetry in my life—between the beginning and middle years of my design career, vacations, life events, etc. Sometimes, the poetry pops out visibly like when I do a reading or write a piece. Mostly, it happens underneath things like how I talk to people, what I notice, how I build things, why I read things, who I decide to listen to. The root of everything I do is the poetry.

I feel a constant push-and-pull dynamic between it and ALL THAT ONE MUST ACCOMPLISH IN LIFE! Even as I slowly accrue a pile of accomplishments, I often just feel like a failed creative with terrible answers to the question: “What do you write?”

Then, we get to the year 2023.

It’s my first poetry reading since the beginning of the pandemic, and the poet in question in Mahtem Shifferaw. I know her through other writer friends, but this is the first time I’ll hear her work. (Later during the reading, she’ll kindle my heart by saying: “I love poetry readings. They’re just a place for people to be weird.”)

While waiting for the reading to start, I hang out in the bookstore, and that’s when I see the poet Gail Wronsky enter. She’s not only a talented writer but she’s also my poetry teacher. More than 20 years ago, I took all of Gail’s four classes in college and was converted into a poet.

“Gail!” I jump out of my chair. As I introduce myself, I can see how my name takes her brain back in time to place me amidst all her students.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Mahtem is my student,” she says. That’s how I learn 15 years ago because of Gail, Mahtem switched her major from science to poetry.

We talk about all the time that’s come between then and now. How the last time we spoke was when Gail wrote my recommendations for my MFA. How I just started following her on Instagram and loved her cafe poems.

“Are you still teaching?” I ask.

“Actually, I just retired after 30 years,” she says.

“Wow. I can’t imagine the campus without you!”

Then, it just starts coming out: all the ways she’s made me who I am.

Gail taught me how to go to poetry readings. That’s really where I fell in love with the art. It was just magical to read a poem on the page, but the live act gave it a second life. It was like an intimidate date with the poet even as you sat in a crowd. And that’s what Mahtem’s reading would be—a collection of people in a dark room, listening, sighing and clapping over the unexpected and beautiful ways a person thinks and engages with the world through language.
Gail taught me how to read poetry, and then of course, to want to write my own and share it. For me, poetry is the truest, most sincere and beautiful way to express our thoughts, our condition and our relationship to the world.
But most importantly, Gail taught me how to find poetry outside of the classroom and beyond my books. Such that even when I’m making a diagram in Figma, I ask myself: Where’s the poetry? How even now as I sit at my desk typing this essay, I can hear the chirp of a bird even as the leaf blower tries to shout it down. Such that back at the reading, when Mahtem explained how her poems were born from letters she never sent, I thought: Yes, that’s poetry.

Because of Gail, I sought out those feelings once I graduated from college. It’s why I came back to earn my MFA. No matter how far I roam, I always come back to refocus my life around poetry. It’s what I’m doing now with this writing challenge on Substack.

“You changed me in profound ways,” I say to Gail.

“Thank you,” she says humbly. “Because you never really know.”

Then I sat in that dark room, listening to Mahtem, completely overwhelmed. Because I finally knew how to answer that question those three people asked more than 10 years ago in those other black rooms.

The answer was so much bigger than I expected and yet so simple. That’s why I couldn’t explain it to my ex-boyfriend because it was so much bigger than a hobby you did on weekends. At the same time, that’s why I couldn’t share it with him—I thought it was way more complicated than it turned out to be.

Here’s the answer; Here’s the pitch

The good news is poetry is everywhere. So that feeling you want is yours to experience whenever and wherever you want. It’s also yours to create and insert in places no one would ever expect. Where is poetry? Wherever you want it!

Here’s your challenge: How will you teach yourself to notice it? To make it? You’ve taken the first step by being here tonight. You’ve taken the second step by asking me this question. Now for the third step, there’s lots of options—go to readings, discover poetry books, follow poets online, take a poetry class, train yourself to become situational aware of poetic moments, etc.

The choice of adventure is yours, and whichever you choose, all roads will lead to the answer you want—no matter what.