Dust off your muse, it’s National Poetry Month.

People tend to respond to poetry in one of two ways: 1. They love it, read it, write it, take it to heart and “get” the deepest meaning of the most obtuse free-form verse. 2. Huh?

Those who fall in category number two will go to great lengths to avoid being exposed to poetry, as if it were the latest incurable killer disease. It makes them feel uncomfortable, bored or stupid. They just want to ask, why doesn’t it rhyme?

I have to admit I fell more in the latter camp than the former for much of my life. I liked Carl Sandberg in grade school, and even liked the sonnets of Shakespeare in high school. I didn’t always understand what he was talking about, but at least it had a good rhythm:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments/

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds

(from Sonnet 116)

But when I read Tess Gallagher poems like:

The quilt has slipped/

my shoulders. And when/

you kiss the knots/

in my fate like that/

it’s as if a lynx/

co-exists with a housecat.

(from Lynx Light)

It was beautiful, but what did it mean?

The lightbulb finally went on for me when a college English teacher, a poet herself, relieved me of the burden of trying to understand such poetry.

You don’t have to understand it, just feel it,” she said.

What a relief! I was free to enjoy poetry for the way it made me feel, not just for the message I may or may not find there. Thank you, Libby Wagner.

Funny thing, once I stopped trying so hard, it was like looking at those 3-D posters where the image pops out if you’re not focussing on it — the poems started making sense on an emotional level that they didn’t on a logical level.

But while poetry is a relatively new delight to me, it’s the lifeblood of many talented writers here in Kitsap Country, who are celebrating National Poetry Month in a variety of ways.

Forgive me if other parts of the county feel neglected, but the only poets I heard from were on Bainbridge Island.

They kicked off the month with the 22nd Annual San Carlos Poetry Reading April 2. Other events planned for the month are “I Am From . . .” a joint IslandWood/Bainbridge Island Arts and Humanities Council poetry project, with three workshops.

Participants are asked to create poems about their relationships with the place they call home. The first workshop was April 2, the next is April 9 at IslandWood and the final one is April 23 at the Bainbridge Public Library. You can register or find information at www.islandwood.org. The workshops are free.

You don’t have to go far to find poetry by local authors. Poetry Corners features poster-sized poems displayed in store windows throughout downtown Winslow. Nearly 40 poets have signed on to the project, including Rhonda Broatch, Jenifer Lawrence and John Willit.

The poems are based on the theme “The Ocean,” and are tied to the current Bainbridge Island Humanities Inquiry series, “Sharing an Ocean: Living on the Pacific Rim.”

If you’ve walked on the Bainbridge ferry recently you’ve probably seen the poetry banners bedecking the foot passenger walkway. I just wish they would turn them around so we could read the other side — it’s hard to absorb poetry with a crush of offloading commuters sweeping you along.

The biggest poetry movement in the last decade, at least, has been the Poets Against War movement, started by Port Townsend poet and publisher Sam Hamill.

Unfortunately, they still have a cause.

Irish poet William Butler Yeats didn’t feel poets could make a difference, which he stated famously in “On Being Asked for a War Poem (1915)”:

I think it is better that in times like these/

A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth/

We have no gift to set a statesman right:

He has had enough of meddling who can please/

A young girl in the indolence of her youth,

Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

Yeats apparently revised that opinion after the Easter uprising of 1916, in which Irish revolutionaries were slaughtered in Dublin by the ruling British.

“Easter 1916” is one of the most touching anti-war poems ever written, with the concluding lines:

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Kingston poet Kelli Russell Agodon is the organizer of an international peace project called “The Making of Peace Poetry Broadside Series.”

The project involves printing the works of 13 well-known and newer poets on broadsides (small posters) and displaying them in public venues across the country.

Locally they can be viewed at Eagle Harbor Books in downtown Winslow. There is also a selection of the poems on her Web site, www.agodon.com/themakingofpeace.

Finally, you can instill a love for poetry in children by reading age-appropriate poems to them — Dr. Suess and Jack Prelutsky are two favorites. You’ll save them a lot of pain later.