Poetry is good for you. Honest.

Convincing people of this proposition is a daunting task. Even some English professors I know are uncomfortable with poetry. They would rather read novels, short stories, memoirs or newspapers any day. They avoid teaching poetry in their classes, like anxious tennis players who run around their backhand.

If my bookish cohorts get nervous around poetry, I can easily imagine how resistant the mythical person on the street is to the prospect of reading a poem voluntarily.

There’s no question that poetry has a lot going against it. At some point, poetry became difficult. Whether this happened in the 17th century or the 20th really doesn’t matter. People think poetry is hard, if not impossible, to understand. They have a point. The most recent book by one of America’s best-known poets, Billy Collins, is called “The Trouble With Poetry.” This is not a good sign.

Even when poetry isn’t difficult, it’s considered weird. It’s seen as something beatniks and hippies used to write. It’s something people scribble in notebooks as they lurk in cafes, or something you had to write a paper about in high school.

It’s something people shout on an MTV show. It occupies one shelf somewhere in the obscure center of bookstores, where the cat sleeps or the body-pierced person lounges.

And who besides a few students and professors doesn’t have something better to do with their time than read a poem? I happen to love poetry, but most nights I love “Law and Order” reruns even more.

So, yes, I know I’m going against a strong headwind when I insist that poems can be good for you. Nonetheless, here’s my case for poetry:

Regardless of what you are interested in, preoccupied by, or worried about, there’s a poem out there that shares your point of view and probably adds a satisfying twist.

Does it seem like you just go to work, come home, go to sleep, get up and go to work again your whole life? William Wordsworth has just the poem for you: “The World Is Too Much With Us,” in which he observes, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” The English poet published this work in 1807, long before people spent half their lives on freeways and before advertisers perfected the art of tricking us into buying stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have. This poem is good for the overworked soul.

If you suspect our leaders are just a little too quick to send other people’s brothers, sisters, daughters, and sons into combat, consider W.H. Auden’s two-line poem, “Epitaph For the Unknown Soldier”:

“To save your world, you asked this man to die:

Would this man, could he see you now, ask Why?”

Sick of gasbag politicians and talking heads from the left and the right? Try Tom Clark’s “Apocalyptic Talk Show,” from his book, “Easter Sunday.” Or read e.e. cummings’ sendup of political flatulence, “next to of course god america i.”

Those familiar with the hardships of the farming life, by the way, will love cummings’ poem “nobody loses all the time.”

Looking forward to fishing season? Try Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” or Amy Lowell’s “The Pike.”

Have you, in spite of your best efforts and past results, fallen in love? Then you must read “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” by Pablo Neruda, whose poetry shares your emotional intoxication. You can even buy the soundtrack to the movie “Il Postino” and hear actors such as Andy Garcia reading Neruda’s poems to you and your beloved.

Maybe you’re a parent feeling underappreciated by your children. If so, look at Langston Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son,” in which a mother tells her son, “And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” If you think of yourself as a survivor, read Hughes’ poem “Still Here,” or if what you’re trying to survive is a hangover, try Hughes’ “Morning After.”

Sports? Well, for baseball fans, there is of course the venerable “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer. (This and other old popular American poems can be found in “Best Loved Poems of American People,” edited by Hazel Felleman and sold inexpensively by Dover Books. These are the poems our parents and grandparents read and occasionally quoted to us.)

But there’s also Tom Clark’s book of baseball poems, “Blue.” Clark is an Oakland Athletics fan, but his real love is the game itself. May Swenson’s poem “Analysis of Baseball” is superb. There’s a big list of baseball poems on the Web site www.baseball-almanac.com.

And there is, believe it or not, a terrific book of poems by a former NBA player, Tom Meschery: “Nothing We Lose Can Be Replaced.” Meschery played for the Golden State (San Francisco) Warriors and the Seattle SuperSonics.

Cat-lovers, obviously, need look no further than T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” (there’s an illustrated edition, not to mention a Broadway musical). If you’re a dog person, take a sniff of “Doggerel: Poems About Dogs” (2003), edited by Carmela Ciuraru.

In other words, poems about things you’re already interested in are good for you, especially because they express your interest in other words, sometimes the best words.

If you find yourself – by accident, of course – in the poetry section of a bookstore, my advice is this. First, don’t try to pet the store cat. Second, if you don’t a see a book by a poet you already know, select a book at random. Open it. Start to read a poem. If it makes absolutely no sense to you, close the book and put it back. Try another book until you find a poem that invites you into its world.

Poems, like golf courses, chess partners, fishing holes and recipes, should be just difficult enough to challenge you and to enjoy. They shouldn’t be too easy, but they shouldn’t leave you bewildered, either.

Final sales pitch: The vast majority of poems have this going for them: They’re very short. You can finish reading several as you commute on the bus or the train. You can read one after you’ve baited the hook but before the fish has taken the bait.

You can even read one during the commercials as you’re watching “Law and Order” – or “Def Poetry Jam.”