Musician Paul Kelly argues that poetry "enhances and heightens life".
And if you're one of the many who find poetry confusing, intimidating or just plain boring, he gets it — but he wants to change your mind.
Good poetry is something that stays with you forever, he tells ABC RN's Life Matters.
"It becomes like a companion or something that you carry around with you."
Often, he says, we turn to it without even knowing.
"'Vanish into thin air'. That's from Shakespeare," he says.
Kelly defines poetry as simply as "intense, memorable speech".
"People reach for poetry at ceremonial occasions, weddings, funerals and all kinds of gatherings, so it's all around us all the time.
"It's just a matter of not being afraid of it."
Crucial, fantastic and thrilling
The poetry Kelly loves is about as broad as it gets. Among his favourites are poets from Sappho to Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy to Maxine Beneba Clarke, Briggs, Warsan Shire and the list goes on.
He got into poetry at high school, where he first encountered Macbeth.
"That just rocked my head. I still find the language of Shakespeare, especially in the plays, just sort of thrilling," he says.
"It sounds like it's just sort of been made up on the spot. It's got that incredible sort of energy and heightened intensity."
Shakespeare and Greek tragedies can be great ways for young people to begin to engage with poetry, Kelly says.
"There's murder, sex, revenge — stuff you can really get stuck into."
Kelly, whose latest album is called Poetry and latest book is Love is as Strong as Death, has made another recent push to open up the world of poetry.
He's helped create a classroom resource with ABC Education to help students get familiar with the possibilities of poetry.
In the resource, Kelly, musician Alice Keath and Maxine Beneba Clarke read and perform a range of poems, then pick apart and discuss them.
Education officer Emma Jenkins from the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English also helped create the resource.
She believes poetry is a "crucial part" of a "rich literary diet that kids need to have in order to function, emote and express themselves in the world".
Although, she admits poetry can be a little scary.
"It's open to so many different interpretations and I think some of those ambiguities are what causes a little bit of confusion," Jenkins says.
"There's a lot of interest in being right and presenting the right answer, and poetry sometimes doesn't always have that."
But that is "what makes it so fantastic", she argues.
"That's the beauty of poetry, that we can all interpret something different from each piece."
Instagram and hip hop as paths in
Like Kelly, Jenkins hopes to dispel some of the fear around poetry.
But she's also happy that young people are being exposed to poetry "more than they realise", with the rise of Instagram poets like Beau Taplin or Rupi Kaur.
"So I think [young people] are probably ready to engage with poetry, and they're interested in poetry and what they can express through the form."
There's an added benefit to encountering poetry through social media: a poem gets to be something more than just words on a page.
After all, poetry is "often written for the ear; to be performed and read aloud", Jenkins says.
Through performance, different voices and accents, rhythms, tones and cadences come alive.
It's for this reason that hip hop is another great way into poetry, Kelly says. He names the music of Dobby, Barkaa and Briggs as great examples.
Hip hop has the same form restrictions and storytelling capacity as poetry, Kelly says, along with "heaps of alliteration and rhythm and internal rhyme".
It's just one of many paths into poetry that he hopes people find, to arrive at that life-changing form he fell in love with as a teenager.
"Poetry is not something to be afraid of," he says.
"Just have fun with it. Poetry can be your friend. You can join the whole history of poetry by just starting to try to write your own poems.
"It's not that far off. It's not ungraspable. It's not unreachable. It's all around us anyway."
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