I don’t get poetry. Why don’t they just say what they mean? It always feels like a puzzle I’m supposed to figure out. Commonly heard complaints about poetry, and it’s true, poetry can often be annoyingly evasive.

Sometimes that’s intentional. The poet writing in a sort of code to keep content that could be dangerous in the wrong hands or hurt someone’s feelings or reflect poorly on them somewhat obscured. More often it’s simply a result of the poet knowing more context for the poem than certain readers do. Poetry tends to ride the thin line between facility and what might be called “authenticity,” the expression of a moment, thought, feeling, etc. with both the complex connections and the absence of clarity the experience involved. Thus, most often, the puzzling nature of much poetry is simply the result of the poet trying to present in such a way that it feels real, leaving the “white space” of experience intact so that the reader can enter the poem by filling in the gaps from their own experience or understanding.

I remember 9th grade English with Mr. Knudsen, reading Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Knudsen’s comment that what a lovely poem it was, how it conjured the image of New England woods filling with snow, and then shifting our attention to the musicality of the Rubaiyat Stanza, was all interesting, but seemed to me beside the point. All I could think about were the words dark and deep and the phrase before I sleep. It was exactly that moment that I realized just how wonderfully sneaky poetry could be because while the class was reveling in Frost’s wintry imagery, I was imagining this speaker standing alone, watching woods fill up snow, and feeling tempted to disappear into those woods, beneath the snow, ultimately held back from such a fatal decision only by the promises he had to keep.

I imagine Frost pictured this temptation as fleeting, so much so that it barely penetrated the surface of the traveler’s consciousness, a brief impulse, a moment of imagined release. And in the interest of authenticity, he presented it that way in the poem, causing most readers to focus on the beautiful imagery rather than the darker undercurrent. And yet, I believe much of our deeper understanding of things happens similarly, as brief or sudden moments of enlightenment, epiphany, glimpses of possibilities that for various reasons we often can’t or won’t hold onto or focus on for very long.

The poem, “Interwoven,” from my 2025 book, “Elemental,” illustrates how things we do now might bring back feelings, thoughts, even understandings of things that happened to us in the past. It also illustrates how those understandings sometimes arrive not as part of a conscious endeavor but somewhat sneakily, rising up from the depths of memory because our brains have created a connection that while explicable is unexpected. Put simply, it illustrates perhaps my favorite quality of poetry: how a poem can be about one thing, but also about something else. Discovering that unexpected connection, that metaphor, is one of the greatest joys of reading poetry, so I won’t explain the poem here, but if, after reading it, you’re not sure what pulling vines has to do with shame, guilt, a sense of unworth, come see me at Taste Full Beans or Poetry Hickory or the Hickory Poetry Salon, and we can talk about it further.

Interwoven

In the backyard of the new house

in an area 300 feet square

where I want to plant rhododendron,

Japanese maple, Lady Jane magnolia,

I find a network of vines that boggles

the mind, blackberry and vinca, greenbrier

and wisteria, honeysuckle and grape,

and many I cannot name,

planted or let grow by someone

grown tired of gardening, some

traveling 20ft across the ground,

even further beneath the surface in search

of a tree or wall or fence to climb,

anything vertical in their vegetative mind.

Pulling one reveals a dozen more,

layered on top of each other, like some

multi-headed hydra, unending, insidious

as shame, guilt, a sense of unworth,

woven together to form an almost

immovable fabric. I pull vines

with a passion I don’t completely understand

for hours at a time, days in a row,

and weeks later still feel

I’ve gained so little ground,

and only found, an unsought secret

to how unwanted things last.