"Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people"

A compact rebuke of literary insularity, the line points to a feedback loop: when poems turn away from the textures of ordinary life, people turn away from poems. Neglect begets neglect. It isn’t an accusation that readers are lazy; it is a challenge to poets, publishers, and gatekeepers to examine who their work addresses, whose language it speaks, and whose realities it honors.

Poetry can “ignore” people in many subtle ways. It hides inside professional codes and workshop dialects, prizes cleverness over candor, and relies on allusions that require specialized schooling. Anthologies and curricula often present poetry as a puzzle to solve rather than a companion to live with, training readers to fear misinterpretation instead of inviting them to feel. When the canon narrows to a conversation among the initiated, the wider public hears only the murmur of a closed room.

Yet wherever poems meet people where they live, ballads, protest chants, hip-hop, slam stages, lullabies, funeral eulogies, audiences gather eagerly. The appetite for rhythm, image, and distilled feeling has never diminished; what falters is relevance and hospitality. Poetry flourishes when it remembers its roots in speech: a music of the mouth and ear, a technology for memory, a vessel for anger, praise, grief, and play. It reaches not by dumbing down but by tuning in, to the cadences of everyday talk and to the urgencies of the moment.

The line also distributes responsibility. Poets are asked to risk clarity, risk tenderness, risk being understood. Institutions are asked to broaden the platforms, teach for delight as well as analysis, and sponsor translation and local voices. Readers are invited to meet the art halfway, to accept difficulty when it earns its keep, and to seek the aliveness that great poems carry. When attention runs both ways, poetry attending to people, people attending to poetry, the distance closes, and the art once again becomes a public good: intimate, communal, and necessary.