Editor’s Note: Katha Pollitt is the author of The Mind-Body Problem: Poems and five other books. A poet, essayist and columnist for The Nation, she is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting grant.

Can you name an art form that millions practice, but is widely believed to be difficult, boring and on its last legs? That’s right: poetry. Pundits have been writing its obituary for decades — "Poetry is dead. Does anybody really care?" asked Newsweek snarkily in May. (Well, at least they waited till April, National Poetry Month, was over.) But obviously, there is something unkillable about poetry, because people keep writing it — in the privacy of their bedrooms after a long day of work and children, in writing groups, creative writing classes and MFA programs, in workshops at libraries and Ys and youth centers and senior centers and afterschool programs and even prisons.

My father, a lawyer, wrote poems occasionally; and so did his mother, my grandmother, also a lawyer. They wrote poetry the way I play the piano — for the pleasure of it: to fix a moment in time, to express a striking thought, to relieve strong feeling, to mark an event. And they’re not so unusual. When I taught a poetry workshop at the 92nd St Y in Manhattan, around the big table sat schoolteachers, stay-at-home mothers, magazine editors and lawyers (something about that profession!) as well as a nanny, a professor of Spanish, a would-be country musician and Paolo, the dashing Italian oncologist. Some were beginners; others had been writing for years. One or two already had MFAs. All these people would vigorously reject the notion that the art they loved was dead.

The paradox of poetry is that so many more people write it than read it. In this, it’s a little different than the other arts: people who play instruments listen to music all the time. Would-be painters spend lots of time in museums and galleries. I’m not sure why this disconnect exists: perhaps it’s a chicken and egg thing, where the less attention is paid to poetry — in magazines, reviews, even bookstores — the less people are aware of what’s going on in the art, which causes the media to neglect poetry even more, because who wants to read about this obscure thing nobody seems to care about? Or perhaps it’s due to the way poetry is taught in high school, as a kind of maddeningly complicated way of saying something simple, like seize the day, or my girlfriend says she loves me, so why won’t she sleep with me?

Workshops and how-to-write-a-poem manuals are all very well, but it’s no secret that reading widely and deeply is the one sure way to move your own writing forward. It’s how you learn what the possibilities are: what can be done with words, images, rhythm. Reading your contemporaries is a crucial part of that process: it’s how you invent a new wheel instead of laboriously reinventing the wheel of 20 or 30 years ago. It’s how you get out of your own head, temporarily, and see what’s going on in someone else’s — someone who is confronting the same world and the same challenges as you.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every would-be poet bought, say, five books of new poetry every year? (Make that ten if you have an MFA.) For less than the cost of that must-have sweater or a couple of dinners in a nice restaurant, you, the secret poetry writers of America, can make poetry visible again, while enriching your own poems in ways that will surprise you and delight you, even if no one but you and your best friends ever read them.

On a budget? There’s always the library. 

Don’t know what poems are worth reading? Click here to read Katha Pollitt’s recommendations for five fantastic poetry books.

Katha Pollitt’s The Mind-Body Problem: Poems has just been published by Random House.