Literarily speaking, there’s nothing quite as bad as bad poetry. Bad novels and stories may make you hurl your book (or your sheaf of papers, if you’re unlucky enough to have a bad novelist as a friend) across the room; bad journalism may inspire you to fire off a furious letter to the editor, but only bad poetry is so bad as to be literally nauseating. You actually feel the muscles in your stomach clinch up and the gorge begin to rise in your throat at lines such as, “I wanted to be there for you/ When your sweet kitten died,/ But I was still locked/ In my own world of pain.”

Sadly, bad poems are everywhere you turn—at bookstore poetry nights, at coffeehouse readings, in creative-writing workshops all over the country, even in the pages of The New Yorker. You have to work really hard to write a bad novel; since there are so many words in novels, most people don’t have the staying power to be a bad novelist. But writing a bad poem is easy. All it takes is a good intention, a strong feeling—preferably about Love, God, Nature, Impending Death, or Personal Grievances Against Your Mother—and approximately five minutes of spare time. An understanding of the grammar and syntax of your native tongue is unnecessary. A vocabulary exceeding that of the typical American fourth-grader (or, alternately, the mouth of a sailor) is not essential. Nor should the search for apt metaphors or similes trouble you because, when you write bad poetry, you are not after the telling image or the resonant connection; you are after Truth, which as every untrained poet believes is unrelated to the world of sense experience.

About these matters I know whereof I speak, for I have written some bad poems myself—rank things featuring flowers and human body parts, some of them rhyming, some of them impersonating sonnets. For anybody alive to feeling and alert to irony, it’s hard to resist the impulse to write a poem. And contrary to what most people seem to think, it is not easy to write a good poem. Even when you know what ought to go into a good poem, even when you’ve spent a lifetime studying astonishing examples of the poet’s art, it’s very hard to make a fine poem. I would even go so far as to say that it’s harder to spawn a living poem than it is to do anything else: design a bridge, perform King Lear, repair a Ferrari, or fly to the moon.

One positive thing this plethora of bad poems demonstrates, however, is just how crucial poetry is to the human spirit. If people didn’t need poems, there wouldn’t be so many folks out there trying to make them up. At its best, poetry is timeless. Its undiluted language speaks across nationality and generation and race and social class and religion and sexual orientation; it utters what is universal but so often inarticulate in the human heart. Good poetry is a perfect antidote to the shallow, aggrieved, rapidly shifting culture of MTVland.

One of the problems with good poetry, however, is access. If bad poetry is ubiquitous, good poetry is in complete exile. Even people who like poetry, or people who could be persuaded to like it if they ever ran across any, have a hard time getting hold of poetry without a determined search. You can’t, after all, pick up a book of real poetry and flip through it while you’re waiting in line at Kroger. You won’t find a real poem printed on the back of your box of breakfast cereal or on the front page of your local newspaper. If you actually decide to head out to one of the large bookstore chains in search of poetry, you will find there one copy of Robert Frost’s selected poems, one copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, and perhaps something by Edna St. Vincent Millay or Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Fueled by a desire to raise the profile of fine contemporary poetry among the few people in America who still read, the Academy of American Poets inaugurated National Poetry Month last year and repeated it this April. Not all of the Academy’s ideas for how to manage this herculean task were equally inspired, however. On April 15, for example, in celebration of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land 75 years ago, 3,000 copies of the poem were handed out to people rushing to file their income taxes at post offices in six different cities. The folks handing out the poems were wearing sandwich signs printed with the opening line of the poem: “April is the cruelest month.”

A more hare-brained idea for inspiring the love of poetry is hard to imagine. A whole lot of educated, truly committed lovers of poetry regard The Waste Land as a brilliant but essentially unreadable poem; wave upon wave of footnotes positively swamps the text, for one thing, and even if you happen to read Latin, Classical Greek, French, German, Italian, and Hindi yourself and so don’t require the foreign-language translations, the chances are pretty good you wouldn’t catch on to the parts that were written in English.

The magnificent muddle of the poem itself is only half the trouble with the tax-day scheme, of course. People who’ve waited till the last possible second to file their income-tax returns are desperate people. They don’t want poets dressed up in cardboard signs to bother them in their desperation, and any poet who persists in doing so will murder forever any fragile germ of poetic feeling in such people. Why not walk around the park on a warm day in May and hand out copies of Mary Oliver or Pattiann Rogers to the picnickers instead? Why not stand outside some downtown cafes, in the dead of a winter night, and slip copies of Frost to folks as they head inside for a cup of coffee? You might get a few converts that way. T.S. Eliot is just not a good missionary for poetry. He’s preaching to the choir.

One good idea the Academy of American Poets had this year is the inauguration of a Web page (www.poets.org). It’s got an ongoing series of exhibits about 20th-century poetry, featuring more than 40 poets, and about literary periods (such as the Harlem Renaissance) and poetic themes (such as love and grief); it’s got pictures and biographies of the poets; it’s got audio clips of poets reading their own work. It’s a fun, high-tech way to meander around in poetic lives and poetic language.

But here in Nashville you don’t need the latest in technology to find the kind of poetry that really sings, that calls to that secret place in your heart where you go when no one is looking. All you have to do is head to the poetry corner of any real bookstore. You’ll find the great and famous folks there, and some new voices as well. You might consider books by Bill Brown, Kate Daniels, Mark Jarman, and Diann Blakely Shoaf. They all live right here in town, but you won’t find them in coffeehouses reading bad poems. Hard as it is to do, they write good poems. God bless their generous hearts.