Want to make people hate the poet you love the most? Read your favorite poetry out loud to them.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge was on the radio this morning while I was washing the dishes and, wouldn’t you know it, as soon as my hands were deep in the suds, the featured guest started reading Sylvia Plath poems.

I don’t like Sylvia Plath to begin with, but she was making Plath’s poetry sound even more wretched than it usually is by reading it in that hollow voice that most untrained, unpracticed speakers adopt because they believe it makes poetry sound deep and meaningful.

I took a deep breath and kept washing dishes. Maybe she’s only quoting a couple lines, I told myself. Surely it’ll be over quickly and relatively painlessly. But no. She wanted to read the entire poem, maybe a hundred lines or so. I toughed it out to the very last line to see if maybe she would pass the rest of the time on the show talking about the poem, and she did for a few minutes, but when she launched into reading more Sylvia Plath I shook the suds off my hands and gave the tuning dial a quick spin up to the pop music station.

It was playing 80s synth. I left it there anyway. Better than Sylvia Plath.