When my students tell me that poetry is boring, I am convinced that they really mean that it confuses them. Like the child in the poem, I bring them handfuls of “grass,” and they say, like Whitman, “I don’t know what that is.” They look at these words, and for whatever reason—the language is confusing or dense or archaic—they can’t immediately understand what is happening. Then, they get worried and maybe even insecure. They want to understand what the poetry means. When the meaning does not present itself, they get frustrated. They stop at “I don’t know.” What Whitman teaches us is that, if we want to explore all of the meanings of grass, we can’t stop at “I don’t know.” We have to move on to the second part, where we make silly, conflicting, perhaps outrageous guesses. That is, as it turns out, where much of the fun is.