Reflections on poetry

As most of you know by now poetry is a little alien to me, though I am definitely starting to enjoy it more as I learn to understand it and not be ‘afraid’ of it. For me any enthusiasm was lost when learning poetry at school for two reasons really, the choice of poetry available (possibly just down to the curriculum at the time) and the lack of enthusiasm from my English teacher for the subject, I did enjoy some poetry I remember watching a series of readings at an evening event with Lemn Sissay poet and playwright from Manchester (his poetry is on many buildings in the central Manchester area) and thoroughly enjoyed it, though possibly more due to the humour he brought to the performance of it (he was pretty much a stand up comic between readings).
Although I didn’t find too much within the readings to really get my teeth into I did find a connection with Suzi Clipson-Boyles, at first the comment about poets dressed as clowns and puppet shows made me think, What? Sounds like a load of baloney, it does seem a very condescending way to approach it and I did wonder how many serious poets would consider this approach to be degrading to their poetry, can’t imagine Blake or Byron telling poetry through sock puppets! Though having seen an established poet bring humour into his readings of quite dark and deep poems of a personal nature, breaking up and adding to his work by a level of charisma it is in a way a similar way of raking a barrier for people that have in the past struggled to enjoy poetry.
Poetry never seemed accessible and although we looked at different genres I never found a style that I related too or enjoyed that much that I wanted to read more, again I do agree with SCB it that learning that there are many forms and genres so you can find the one that reaches out to you, maybe is I had more access I may have read more poetry, I don’t recall there being much other than the anthologies we studied to look at though.
Sean Flynn’s approach seem s a good one though it also seems obvious that the best way to encourage enjoyment of poetry beyond the enthusiasm is to tackle it with suitable choices of poetry “My choice of poems for the class was guided by the simple principle: would they enjoy them?” not sure the curriculum was devised this was, as a starting point this seems fair and once the usual fear has been broached you would be able to look at the core poetry and beyond.

Just wanted to add something about the idea of building vocabulary and word play, for me its an iteresting idea as am very into wordplay, it reminded me of a short story/poemy type thing I wrote a few years back about the wanderers in wonder world and wondering if they wondered as they wandered, or wondered about the way they wandered etc, which to be fair was very confusing even for me and I wrote it!
So basically I agree with the assertion that poetry can aid this kind of development in using metaphors and using words/sentences with dual meanings and intentional wrong turns.