Why I read poetry even though it feels impractical

For most of my adult life I have kept a slim book of poems somewhere within arm's reach. It moves from bag to bedside table to kitchen counter without ever announcing what it is for. Friends who notice it tend to ask the same question, sometimes politely, sometimes with a raised eyebrow: why bother reading something that does not clearly advance a career, win a contract, or teach a marketable skill? It is a fair question, and one I have asked myself often enough to deserve a careful answer.

The honest defence of reading poetry is not that it makes you more productive, better at work, or sharper in meetings. The defence is closer to the opposite: it is a deliberate practice of attention that has no measurable return, and that is exactly the point. In a country like Australia where the cultural calendar is studded with writers' festivals from Sydney to Perth, and where small publishers in Adelaide and Brisbane keep putting out gorgeous collections of verse, the choice to read a poem rather than scroll a feed feels almost countercultural. It is a small refusal to optimise every spare minute, and I have come to see that refusal as a form of maintenance.

The quiet defence of an impractical habit

Calling poetry impractical is a relatively modern habit. For most of the long history of English letters, poems were how people memorised, transmitted, and argued. Verse carried treaties, laments, jokes, and political pamphlets before newspapers, radio, or social media existed. The modern sense of impracticality only arrives once a poem is no longer required for any civic task, and once its value has to be defended on aesthetic or psychological grounds alone.

That defence is harder to make in a hurry. If someone asks why I am reading Seamus Heaney on the tram into the city, I cannot point to a deliverable. I cannot say it will help me sell more or manage better. The book is not a textbook and I am not training for anything. The most honest answer is that the reading itself is the point: a few minutes inside a deliberately shaped set of lines, where every word has been weighed and chosen.

There is something faintly embarrassing about admitting that. We live in an era that rewards clear outcomes and visible progress. A poem offers neither. Yet the embarrassment is part of what makes the habit worth defending. If reading poetry were easy to justify in instrumental language, it would already have been absorbed into the productivity industry and stripped of its strangeness.

What poetry does to the way I read everything else

Poetry is the slowest form of reading I do. Compared with a news article, a podcast transcript, or even a long magazine piece, a poem forces me to slow down to almost walking pace. Each line asks to be heard before the next one arrives. A good poem will not let me skim it for the gist, because the gist is inseparable from the rhythm, the line break, and the choice of a single word over its near neighbour.

That slowness has a curious after-effect. When I put the book down and return to email or news, I find I read those things differently. I notice the construction of sentences. I catch the small rhetorical moves that usually slide past. The poem has retuned my attention, and the retuning lasts longer than the reading itself. It is the same effect I get from a long walk along the Yarra or a slow coffee at a Melbourne café, except that the retuning happens inside language.

This is one of the things I have tried to describe in The case for writing long-form blog posts in 2025. Long form writing, like poetry, depends on a kind of attention that the rest of the internet has spent the last decade trying to dissolve. Both ask for something of the reader that scrolling refuses to give.

Australian readers, Australian publishers, and a healthy verse habit

Australia has a quietly remarkable poetry ecosystem. Giramondo in Sydney, Puncher and Wattmann, UQP in Brisbane, and Wakefield Press in Adelaide keep the supply of new books flowing. The Melbourne and Sydney writers' festivals bookend the literary year with readings that fill rooms quickly. State libraries from the State Library of Victoria to the State Library of New South Wales hold free events that put living poets in front of readers who might otherwise only meet them in print.

What this means is that reading Australian verse does not require special effort. The books are stocked in ordinary bookshops in Carlton, Newtown, and Fremantle. The poets tour regional centres as well as capitals. Small magazines such as Overland and Meanjin, both now Brisbane-based, continue to publish new work alongside their essays. The obstacle is the same one I have met in Dublin and everywhere else: the feeling that poetry is something for someone else, on a different shelf.

That obstacle is partly a habit of attention and partly a legacy of how literature was taught in schools. The Australian Curriculum frames English as a study of texts across modes, and poetry sits inside that frame, but many adults remember it as the thing they analysed in year nine. Reading poetry for oneself, on a personal schedule, is a quiet rebellion against the residue of that impression.

Slow reading in a country built for speed

Australia is a country built for speed in some surprising ways. The long distances between cities mean that everything moves: people fly, freight moves, communications cross time zones. Coffee is fast and strong and ordered without ceremony in a takeaway cup. Sydney's commuter rail moves hundreds of thousands of workers between suburbs and the CBD every weekday. The pace encourages a reading diet of short, scannable, easily abandoned pieces.

A poem does not survive that pace. It needs a different kind of time. For me, that time is usually a Saturday morning at a café in Surry Hills or a Sunday afternoon in a garden. I have come to think of it as a counterweight to the working week rather than part of it. Reading a poem on the bus feels like trying to have a long phone call in a shopping centre; the surroundings fight you. Reading one at home feels closer to the conditions it actually asks for.

This is not a counsel of perfection. It is a habit I am still building. The habit is easier to keep in a country where coffee shops treat sitting still as a normal human activity, and where libraries and gardens offer a public space in which no one will ask what you are reading or why.

Why the impractical defence is the only one that holds

The strongest defence of reading poetry is the one that refuses to pretend it is practical. As soon as poetry is justified as good for vocabulary, emotional intelligence, or the brain, it becomes vulnerable to a counter-argument. Someone will eventually show that a language learning streak improves vocabulary more efficiently, or that a meditation app delivers the same stress relief in less time. The defence collapses the moment it pretends to be about measurable benefits.

The defence that holds is the one that admits the activity has no measurable benefit. I read poetry because the experience of a well-made poem is its own reward, in the way that listening to a particular piece of music is its own reward, or sitting by the harbour at twilight is its own reward. A life made entirely of productive activity would be unbearable, and the Australian conversation about work-life balance, weekend rest, and the four-day work week trial that ran in various state departments already shows a quiet hunger for activities that pay nothing but themselves.

Reading poetry is one of those activities. It pays in attention, in texture, in the occasional line that returns to you years later when you most need it. The pay is real, but it is not bankable. That is enough.

An Australian shelf to begin with

If you have never read Australian poetry for pleasure, the country offers a deep shelf of well-made verse. Les Murray's pastoral poems in collections such as "The Daylight Moon" reward any reader who has ever looked at a paddock and felt something unsaid. Judith Wright's "The Moving Image" remains a foundation stone of modern Australian verse, and her short lyrics can be read in a single sitting.

For something more contemporary, Ali Cobby Eckermann's "Ruby Moonlight" brings an Aboriginal voice into the tradition with a directness that no summary can capture. Tony Birch's "Chapters from a Late Notebook" holds a different kind of weight, more domestic and more recent. David Malouf, better known as a novelist, wrote some of the most carefully made poems of the last fifty years in "Earth Hour" and "Typewriter Music." These are only a handful of names from a much larger shelf, but they are a workable place to begin.

Habits that help a poetry habit stick

A few small choices have made it easier for me to keep reading poetry without it slipping off the calendar. They are not rules, only arrangements.

• Keep one book of poems visible at home, not on a high shelf or in a drawer. A book left on the kitchen table is more likely to be opened than one stored in alphabetical order.
• Read a single poem rather than a whole collection. Most poetry books can be entered at any point, and a single poem with a cup of coffee is a complete experience.
• Pair the reading with another slow activity. Walking, sitting in a garden, waiting for a train, or washing dishes by hand all create the kind of time a poem needs.
• Choose a poet whose voice you enjoy before you choose a poet who is supposed to be important. The pleasure of a line is more sustainable than the obligation to admire it.
• Mark up the book lightly. Underline a phrase, write a date in the margin, scribble a question. The book becomes a record of your reading and pulls you back into poems you marked years ago.
• Read at least one living Australian poet each year. The country has a deep bench of working writers, and reading them now is a way of keeping the literature alive in your own imagination.
• Keep a small list of poems you would like to return to. The list is a reading programme you have already written for yourself, and it survives the loss of motivation better than a vague intention to read more.

These are habits I have learned mostly by failing to keep them. The list is short on purpose. Anything longer becomes another productivity system, which is the opposite of what the reading is for.

The archive of slow reading essays lives at his homepage. One Australian poet, one poem, and a quiet hour with the book opened twice this week is a workable place to start.