Prelude to a Poetry Collection

Why do readers so often cringe at the word "poetry"?

I have two not-always-so-humble opinions.

The first is that, at some point during education, too much analysis destroyed the enjoyment.  Some teacher made poetry harder than it needed to be. What is the poet saying?  What symbols did the poet employ? What is the deeeeeeep meaning of this poem? What form, what techniques did the poet use?  

Or the psycho-lit question: what meaning does this have for you, the reader?

(This one also requires self-analysis—possibly for people too cheap or too broke to afford a shrink.)

I like the snapshot story of words and its afterimages. I like the way the arrangement rolls off my tongue or the beat I can't quite shake after reading it. It says something to me personally, lifts my spirits, or leaves a sense of wonder (or delicious chill) with the final lines. Maybe it lingers for reflection when I do some other terminally boring activity.  And/or maybe I enjoy it enough to memorize so I can revisit at will, any time I can't have a book or e-reader in hand.     

                                                                                                                                    

Opinion #2 is that lot of poetry either doesn't make sense at all or it's the sense of the troubled poet psychoanalyzing him/herself.  A confession (heh-heh): most confessional writing, including poems, bores the snot out of me.  By the time I've wandered through someone's self-absorption or self-flagellation, I no longer care whether the teakettle was copper (sorry, "cupric"), the pencil was a 2B stub, and the booze spilled on the floor. I'm glad I only had to plod/slog/trudge through 24 lines of it. (Terribly unsophisticated of me, I know.)  

So, I write the  kind of poetry I like.  I like the challenge, the discipline of writing form poems, rhymed and unrhymed, and doing them well.  I like the liberty of free verse,  of exploring new ways to express a moment or idea cleanly, crisply, creatively.  And since I like poems that also tellor hint a micro-story, my poems lean toward my favorite genres: fantasy and science fiction.

Within the next few days/weeks, my poetry collection, Under Every Moon, will be available, first in an e-version, later in an illustrated print edition.  This collection explores edges where the mundane and uncanny parallel or converge, where ordinary and extraordinary intersect, and where reality and fantasy sometimes collide. In it is the voice of sand, of birds, of the tarot's charioteer, of the crone who spins and weaves dreams and nightmares.  In it is the talismanic beat of a drum, heart, or hoof, and the clatter of dice; there's discovery of a name,  dancing ghosts, and secrets of the sea.  

"Will you join in the rollin' of the bones?"