OK, cards on the table time.

When it comes to the arts, I am pitifully, embarrassingly ignorant.

I couldn't name a baroque master to save my life. Classical music bores me. And poetry? Don't get it. Never read it.

It's not that I'm stupid. I have two college degrees. I can explain in plain English what a tax increment financing district is. I know, in painful detail, how school funding works.

But somewhere in my life -the period when everyone else, I suspect, was learning about the arts - I was sitting in a small high school in rural Minnesota, writing letters to my college-aged boyfriend and speculating about whether our English teacher really was a swinger.

So I was skeptical when Illinois' new poet laureate, Kevin Stein, announced in December that his goal over the next four years would be to attract more of the general public to poetry.

Just how was he going to pull that off?

And could he convert even me?

I decided to call Stein and two other poets and issue a challenge. I would give myself one week to try out poetry, I said. Whatever they suggested, I would do. If they converted me, it'd be their victory. If not, it'd be another slam on the art form; this time in front of 150,000 readers.

All three - Stein, Kenneth Clarke and Glenna Holloway - were practically gleeful to get my call.

We were on.

Lesson One

Even before we meet in person, Clarke, the director of The Poetry Center of Chicago, has a question for me:

"How badly were you scarred by eighth-grade English?"

Not at all, I reply, probably because I don't remember reading any poetry in eighth grade.

Or ninth.

Or tenth.

In fact, until I informed my co-workers that I read "Beowulf" my senior year (and they confirmed my suspicion that the book is actually a poem), I didn't think I ever had a poetry lesson in high school.

This is a good thing, Clarke tells me.

"We won't have to get over any trauma your teachers may have caused you," he says.

We meet in his tiny office inside the School of the Art Institute on a Thursday afternoon.

The first thing I need to know, Clarke says, is that I don't have to like anything.

"If you read a poem and you don't like it," he says, "turn the page. Read something else."

The beauty of poetry is that there's a lot out there, and it's accessible, Clarke says.

For $15 you can get an anthology of poetry (a fancy word for a book with lots of poems that also includes information about the poets). You can take it home and enjoy hundreds of works of art.

The same can't be said about the kind of art you hang on your wall. Even some new, up-and-coming painters sell their works for hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars.

Poetry readings, likewise, are a lot less expensive (read: usually free) than concerts or art exhibits.

I pause for a moment to reflect on this, while Clarke continues to rattle off names of great poets I've never heard of.

I act like I'm still listening, but my mind is racing.

I have a bad spending habit. As in, I have managed to spend myself into an uncomfortable level of debt, due largely - and I note the irony of this - to that college education that didn't teach me about poetry.

Were I to get really into this poetry thing, to take advantage of it as a social event for example, I could save an amazing amount of money. I could spend weekends engrossed in poems instead of drinking beer in Chicago-area bars or wandering through Target, buying things I don't need.

For this reason alone, I remind myself what a great idea this story was.

Even better, I do not leave Clarke's office empty-handed. He loads me with books and recordings of poets he thinks I might like.

One of them is a compact disc of Billy Collins, the former U.S. poet laureate. He's funny, Clarke says, and his wife likes him a lot.

On the way back to the office I pop it in the CD player.

The first poem is titled "another reason I don't keep a gun in the house."

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.

He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark that he barks every time that they leave the house.

They must switch him on on their way out....

The poem - actually the title, followed by the poem - makes me laugh out loud.

It's clever. It's that kind of dry, smart humor that I like. I even notice - with a certain degree of self-satisfaction - that when Collins reads the line "barking, barking, barking," it sounds a bit like an annoying bark. Certainly, this was done on purpose.

I call my sister (a former high school English teacher) and tell her about it.

"I actually like it," I say.

But surely, I think to myself, it can't be this easy.

Lesson Two

I am right.

By the following morning, I'm downright discouraged.

I went home from work the night before, excited to read the books Clarke loaned me.

I started with a thin paperback by Mark Strand, who Clarke said is a very well known poet.

But I didn't get it. Any of it.

I did as Clarke told me and moved on to another book, this one "The Best American Poetry, 1999."

I went through about 30 pages. I found two I liked.

One was about a dad who threw a baseball like a girl. The other was about a hitchhiker picked up by a trucker. It ends with an "f" word that rhymes with "trucker."

This makes me feel stupid.

By the time I drive to work the next day, I'm convinced that me being a poetry fan is a little like a "film buff" whose favorite movies are the "American Pie" trilogy.

Here's the problem as I see it: I am a reporter. When someone dies, I write that they died. They didn't "pass away." They weren't "lost." They died. Straight, simple, to the point.

Strand's poems include lines like this one:

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart/What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself/To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.

I am confident that if I were to write a sentence like this in the Daily Herald, readers would call to complain that I was using drugs.

I'm hopeful my next tutor, Glenna Holloway of Naperville, can help me out.

I picked Holloway off the Illinois State Poetry Society's Web site after reading some of the poems posted by members.

Most of them - prepare to be shocked here - I didn't get. Then I came across a Holloway poem about riding her bike.

I like to bike. And I figured anyone who could get the word "spandex" into a poem was pretty cool.

Holloway is thrilled when she hears this. More writers need to consider their audience, she says.

But she understands what I'm saying about the other poems. And she reassures me it's OK, that I'm not what they call "low brow."

"Rudyard Kipling was considered low brow until he reached worldwide fame," Holloway says.

And even I know who Rudyard Kipling is.

Poems should make me feel something, Holloway says.

Maybe it won't be the entire poem, at first. Perhaps it's just a line or a phrase that catches me. If so, she suggests that I go back later and read the poem again. The more times I read it, the greater the likelihood I'll connect with the rest of it.

Don't worry about knowing the ins and outs of iambic pentameter, she says, or the difference between a sonnet and blank verse. I can get into all that later, she says, if I decide to stick with it.

Her other suggestion is that I go hear someone read poetry live. The intonation as they read, the brief explanations prior to each poem, will help me understand, Holloway says.

And one other thing: It may not be the best idea to curl up with a new book of poetry at 9:30 p.m., after working an 11-hour day. Poetry takes concentration, it takes patience, an appreciation for the value of every word.

I read a poem she had published about the Wright brothers on the 100th anniversary of their first flight. I tell her I like it, and I mean it.

We finish eating our garden quiche and prepare to pay our bill. As we go, I ask Holloway, somewhat jokingly, if she thinks there's hope for me.

"No question," she says, smiling. "No question."

Lesson 3

It is time to meet the master.

But before I head to a poetry reading by Illinois Poet Laureate Kevin Stein, I join a friend for an open mic night at a Chicago bar.

There are bras hanging from the ceiling inside Weeds. As the first poet, a curly-haired man with a bald spot, takes the stage, people begin shouting "Virgin Poet!!!!!" This apparently is his first reading, and the poor man forgets his lines several times, as the heckling gets louder.

Two of the readers are quite good, I think. But one of the poems - about the poet's brother being near death after a fight in Cabrini Green - is constantly interrupted by a very drunk woman in a green feather boa telling her friends - loud enough for everyone to hear - that the guy is a "buzzkill."

This is usually how it goes, my friend tells me. One of five or one of 10 poets are good. The others, well, not so good.

It's entertaining, though, and I'm glad I did it. In fact, I'd do it again.

Which brings me to Peoria's Bradley University, for my second poetry reading in two nights.

This event could not be more different.

We sit in a dark theater, a spotlight shining down on Stein, a young-looking 50-year-old from Indiana dressed in jeans and a sport coat.

Stein has three books of his own poetry published. He is critically acclaimed and has written his own academic texts on poetry.

And he is captivating.

I had read a few of Stein's poems beforehand, but Holloway was right. Hearing Stein read them aloud is a whole different experience.

He is self-deprecating, admonishing us when we applaud and making jokes about his roughly 5-foot, 8-inch frame and his lack of prowess on the high school football field.

His poems run the gamut from the hysterical - in which he tells of playing in a rock band called "Puce Exit" in junior high - to the touching - one about his friend's attempted suicide, another about the death of Harry Caray.

He touches on race relations, working in a corrugated box factory and the letters one of his great aunts sent to his grandfather in between the two world wars.

As we leave, my stepmom, who accompanied me to the reading, and I can't stop talking about the poems, about Stein's down-to-earth personality, about the fact neither of us would have ever considered going to a poetry reading had I not been doing this story - and about how much we would have missed out on, had we not gone.

I tell Stein this when I arrive at his home outside Peoria the next day. He is flattered, of course, but also genuinely happy that he has impressed another nonfan.

"Poetry snobbism doesn't make it much for me," Stein says. "And frankly, it doesn't make it much for poetry."

That's why he made a commitment years ago to write about things like hard labor, real-life experiences, things the average person could relate to.

Over time, as I read more poetry, he says, my tastes may change. I may come to love the "difficult" style of Ezra Pound, for example.

"It's a lifelong thing," Stein says.

Meantime, he adds, I shouldn't be ashamed of what I like or don't like.

"That just means you have an opinion, you have taste," he says. "That's a beautiful thing."

Before we leave, we walk around Stein's wooded yard, him pointing out the apple trees and a 300-year-old burr oak. He's an outdoorsy guy, another thing I like about his poems.

Before I get in my car, I ask Stein to sign the copy of his book that I bought the night before.

This may make me a dork. And I'm pretty sure there's something journalistically wrong with it. But I don't really care.

Heading north along the Illinois River toward Arlington Heights, I'm in the mood for a little more poetry. I pop in a compact disc of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an 84-year-old once tried on obscenity charges for publishing an Allen Ginsburg poem. His wise, gravely voice is strangely soothing, the perfect companion.

A few miles down the road I stop to put gas in my car. As I wait, I pull out "Bruised Paradise," the paperback collection Stein signed, and look inside the front cover to see what he scrawled.

"For Sara," it reads, "Full of spirit and smarts. Cheers, Kevin Stein."

Standing there by the gas pump, I think to myself:

I like poetry.

I really, really like poetry.

Illinois State Poetry Society

www.illinoispoets.org/

The Poetry Center of Chicago

http://www.poetrycenter.org/

How to like poetry

www.yalereviewofbooks.com/archive/winter03/review22.shtml.htm

Favorite Poem Project :http://www.favoritepoem.org/

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