Reclaiming poetry: On intuitive clarity over academic analysis
- Sheelagh Caygill
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
Hollay Ghadery and Rob Winger on making poetry accessible
Were you taught poetry in high school? And if you were, was it a good experience, or did it turn you off poetry for a long time, or for good? Maybe you discovered poetry in college or university and came to appreciate it, or fled from verse without ever looking back.
The experience you had with poetry as a young student can shape your attitudes towards this art form for a long time. It's sad but true: many people don't have a good experience with poetry as young students and so refuse to read poetry or listen to readings ever again.
Rejecting a whole art form brings such loss and is a huge concern! Imagine deciding you'll never return to an art gallery because a heavy-handed teacher told you your painting didn't reflect the assigned theme, or you won't listen to music again because your interpretation of Beethoven's Ode to Joy wasn't what that teacher wanted to hear?
Hollay Ghadery, a host with New Books Network, spoke with poet Rob Winger about this and many other things in a podcast interview last month. Rob's newest collection, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant, is his fourth book of poetry. He's written three previous collections of poetry, including Muybridge's Horse, a Globe and Mail Best Book and CBC Literary Award winner shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award, Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and Ottawa Book Award.
Hollay's first book, Fuse, is her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health and was released in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026.
In a thoughtful and engaging conversation, Hollay and Rob reach into the heart of poetry, exploring meaning, accessibility, the pitfalls of teaching poetry in traditional education, and the profound connection between self and place that permeates Rob's work.
I really enjoyed the conversation between Hollay and Rob and how they illuminated the power and potential of poetry when we strip away restrictions that distance between people and verse, such as ideas around education, interpretation, and how we react to, and feel about, a poem. They challenge the exclusionary notions often imposed by academic settings, advocating for a more intuitive and personal engagement with verse. With intuitive clarity, poetry can speak directly to more people, and reflect the places that surround us.
Rob Winger's poetry: accessible and sophisticated
Hollay praises Rob's poems for their sophisticated yet accessible nature, directly challenging the misconception that poetry is inherently lofty and unreachable.
Rob says the way poetry is taught in schools is often to blame for alienating potential readers, explaining that: "The idea that poems have to be sort of relentlessly brainy and dense and impossible to understand to be any good - that's largely the fault of the way that poetry gets taught in school, where a teacher tells a student that a poem really means one particular thing, and if they can just guess that thing their teacher's thinking, they'll get an A on it and understand poetry."
Hollay Ghadery's early encounter Keats' work
Hollay is one of the many who didn't always have a good experience with poetry as a young student. She recalled how years ago an English teacher marked her down for interpreting Keats's "fair creature of an hour" as life itself, rather than his beloved Fanny Brawne in Keats' poem When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.
"The fact I still remember this shows how much it shook me," says Hollay. "I didn't know a single thing about Fanny, [Keats'] love. I am just being introduced to Keats, I'm a teenager, I don't know anything. And so when I read that, my interpretation—the one that I submitted for a mark—was that the fair creature . . . he was just talking to life, “fair creature” being life. Keats, of course, is not well and has not been well most of his life and is always staring into that abyss.
"I can remember getting this line through that and my mark dropping because, 'No, that's Fanny Brawne'. I'm like: 'Well, this isn't a history class! I didn’t know'."
Feelings and interpretation 'smashed'
"But my interpretation was still right. It doesn't change the fundamental meaning of the poem because to [Keats], Fanny was that. Fanny and life could have been synonymous. And I can remember feeling, as I got older indigent, that I had my feelings and my interpretation of that poem smashed.
That didn't stop me from writing poetry, but it definitely stuck with me about how one teacher can say something to you that really, in my case, just shook my relationship with this art form that I really have always loved.
Rob empathized with Hollay's recollection, invoking Keats's concept of Negative Capability—the ability to dwell in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason"—as the antithesis of such rigid instruction.
Feeling over form
A teacher of writing, poetry, and literature at Ontario's Trent University, Rob references a book he loves on this topic, Matthew Zapruder's Why Poetry. It discusses how, "If a poem gives you a feeling, if it puts you in a strange spot, even if that spot is to say to yourself, 'You know, what the f**k is going on here? I feel totally dislocated', that means the machine of the poem has done something to you. You do understand it, even though people have tried to teach you that you don't understand it unless you can do some sort of literary critical explication of it in some kind of formal academic manner."
Rob notes there are limits to this. A reader can't whatever they think a poem is about is absolutely what it's about. "You can't read some sonnet by Keats and say 'It's about how he hates his mother', just because you feel like that. But you can say, 'Whoa, this reminds me about how this person I know feels that way', and that's totally legitimate and valid and interesting. Or you can say 'I have a weird feeling after this poem', and that means it is working on you. This idea that the poem has to have this thing and you have to have a PhD and have read three billion books to understand how art works . . . . I find often it's the total opposite'."
The theme of nostalgia transcending time
Hollay offered a perceptive observation about Rob's collection, noting a pervasive sense of nostalgia that transcends linear time. Lines like "this sunlight through these strawberries is already only remembered" and "when I show you this photo of my favorite painting made in Paris with palette knives in 1974, I'm giving you my boyhood's village springs" evoke a feeling that isn't simply about the past, but a cumulative yearning for all moments, real and imagined.
Rob, while admitting he hadn't consciously aimed for "ubiquitous nostalgia," connects this reading to his exploration of his own subject position. Growing up in a predominantly white and conventional small town, he grapples with how those ingrained societal norms persist within him. This "ubiquitous nostalgia," he suggests, might reflect the enduring nature of outdated and harmful ideologies. For Rob, confronting these broader issues necessitates examining his own personal experiences, the lens through which he feels most capable of speaking authentically. Hollay then probes how poetry, in its essence, can liberate expression from rigid notions of time.
Good poetry: intuitive clarity over academic analysis
Rob speaks beautifully about poetry's capacity to "make things that are familiar unfamiliar and make things that are unfamiliar familiar," a process of deconstruction and reconstruction. He passionately refutes the idea of poets intentionally being obscure, arguing instead that their aim is often profound clarity. This clarity, however, isn't necessarily logical or utilitarian, but rather a directness that accesses deeper, more significant truths beyond the constraints of cause and effect.
Hollay elaborates on the intuitive clarity of poetry over logic or academic analysis, noting that the clarity "I find while reading my favorite poets isn't necessarily immediately logical clarity. It's more of an intuitive clarity that something makes sense because two things have been put together that might not have otherwise been put together, but it makes more intrinsic sense than anything else."
Connecting the universal to the individual
Rob explores how poetry can achieve a sense of connecting individual experience to universal themes, and he draws on the imagery of Voyager 1 and the vastness of space to illustrate this.
"There's a bunch of stuff in this book about outer space, especially thinking about something like Voyager 1, the probe sent off in the 70s, and thinking about just the immense size of that. When I go outside and look up at the sky at night, I feel like it puts into context how totally unimportant my own life is and how small we all are. And I find this very comforting. I've talked to other people, including my partner, who maybe doesn't agree with that quite, that it seems like perhaps a lonely idea.
"Poetry does so well [at] getting to these universal things, getting to these things that people can relate to by reading about somebody else's experience," he explains.
This resonates with Hollay, who shares her own "rudimentary nihilism" and finding comfort in the idea that the grand, often anxiety-inducing aspects of life ultimately "don't matter," freeing space to appreciate the significance of personal values and experiences.
Rooted in place, thinking of place
Hollay observes that even when not explicitly rooted in a location, the poems are deeply engaged with the idea of place, exploring how the self is formed and shaped by its surroundings. Rob acknowledges this, noting that while these preoccupations might not always be conscious during the writing process, reflecting on the specific places he comes from has been a crucial aspect of his work.
For Rob, grounding his poetry in his own lived reality, acknowledging his privileged position, is essential for honest expression. He also draws inspiration from writers who find deep meaning in the immediate and local, reminding himself and his students that grand, epic themes are no more valid than the stories unfolding right around them. Hollay passionately echoes this, urging artists to find their stories in their everyday lives, emphasizing that art, while not necessarily therapy, is a vital tool for self-discovery and understanding the world.
Stark honesty focused on problematic norms
Rob's poem What We Killed is one Hollay finds unsettling, but at the same time she sees in it a stark and honest reflection on some boys' activities. Rob connects this piece to looking back and, more broadly, thinking about what it means to have made mistakes and giving people a break.
"It's thinking about when I was a little kid, I was a racist, homophobic, misogynist, all kinds of terrible things. When I got a bit older, I figured out that that wasn't great. Part of it is looking back at that sort of idea about these things I had done, things that people continue to do, and thinking about how I think people should know better by the time they're adults."
Connecting the personal to world's sense of urgency
Rob says his reflecting on the past gives the collection a wider view on how it measures up against his ethical urgency, which he senses in the world, too, "with so many things being on fire and the horrid malevolent government just to the south of us and how that stuff's right here in our backyard as well.
"I wanted to treat it and think about it again . . . by using my own experience as an example of it, because I thought I could speak about that with some sort of authority."
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