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If you are going to shell out cash sending a kid to college, you might as well get in on their fun too. That's how my daughter's post-modern lit class slammed me into The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot.

It is, arguably, one of the most important poems of the 20th century. At least that is what they told her and that is what my dad told me when he first gave me a copy as a boy. But she had a class that helped her understand the poem. Alone in my study I didn't get it ... again (sorry Dad).

Sitting there, book in hand, not understanding what I had just read I had to ask myself: is this any different than my experience with physics?

Poems and poetry are, for me, a deep a form of knowing, just like science. Yes, obviously, they are different. But each, in its way, is a way to understand the world.

But what does it mean for a poem to be hard? Is it the same thing as when science is hard? Should we expect to need a class to help us understand poetry, just as we expect needing one for electromagnetism? Where, exactly, do we expect to find our truths and how hard should we expect to fight for them?

To help me answer my questions I was lucky to find John Beer, a poet and professor of English at Portland State University. Beer is author of the much praised The Waste Land and Other Poems. It takes guts to give your work the same title as Eliot's and by all accounts he pulled it off.

In response to my question, "What does it meant for a poem to be hard?" Beer said:

There are, it seems, as many ways for a poem to be difficult as there are for it to be a poem at all. For most people, a lot of poetry written before the twentieth century will be a challenge: the vocabulary will often be unfamiliar, the syntax may be more complicated than we are accustomed to reading, and allusions, especially to classical learning, abound.