Confession: I don’t read nearly as much poetry as I should.
When I do read it, I almost always encounter something delicious and exciting, undiscovered synapses in my brain joining and crackling in delight.
Still, I don’t read enough of it.
This is one reason I’m excited about the Lit Mag Reading Club, to encounter new writers and engage with genres, styles and subjects outside of what I typically read.
In preparation for such reading, I’ve also been asking myself: Do I really know how to read poetry? How should one read poetry? Is there a right or wrong way to engage with a poem?
To seek answers to these questions, I recently turned to YouTube. That platform offers a wealth of lectures, discussions and analyses of poetry, some which are extremely informative and thought-provoking.
There are also a few videos full of terrible instructions.
One particularly strange piece of advice that I heard was to read a poem three times, one time for the sound (okay), a second time for the meaning (okay), and a third time in order to decide whether you agree or disagree with what the poet is saying (come again?).
This last part struck me as truly poor guidance. Sure, some poets might be trying to make a point. But I generally think of poems as places where critical faculties are blissfully surrendered. It’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with the poet. It’s about, among other things, living inside their experience, letting the unexpected arrangement of words and sound unlock something within the reader that might otherwise never be reached.
In many instances, I wouldn’t even know how to agree or disagree with the poet.
Bob, listen. You took the road less traveled and it made all the difference? WRONG. It made no difference.
Tom, sorry, bud. February is, quite literally, the cruelest month.
Actually, Billy, fact check: NOTHING depends on a red wheelbarrow.
I mean, are there poems that strive to make a point? Are there responses that can feel to the reader like, Ah, yes, I agree with that? Sure. Of course.
But to my mind, that is the very last thing I look for in poetry.
Then again, everyone is different, everyone reads differently, and everyone seeks different experiences in what they read.
What I do know is that there are a whole lot of poets and poetry lovers who read this newsletter. Thus, rather than continue down my YouTube poetry-lecture rabbit hole, I thought I would ask all of you.
Nice post and great topic. As a nonfiction writer, I used to spend too much time trying to figure out what a poem meant. There had to be a "story" that I wasn't getting, I thought. A writer friend found it amusing when I told her how I struggled "to get" a poem. She gave me the following advice that opened the door to reading poetry for me. Read without expectation. Let the poem wash over you. Don't try to "work the poem" just let the poem happen. There is no right or wrong way to read it, experience the poem. I guess in some way that advice may sound intangible, less than concrete, but I think that's the point. Take hold of whatever speaks to you on the poem. It's an individual, personal experience.
My smart non-poet writer friends express a lot of bafflement around poetry. I reassure them — they don't have to find the poem's "meaning." Read or listen to poems for the sound, for the feeling, more like music. And don't feel bad if you don't like a poem. Just read the poems you like. There's no failing in that. There are so many categories of fiction. No one says you are a bad fiction reader if you don't happen to like historical novels or mysteries.
I try to read a poem twice, but I often don't unless there's something in the first reading that makes me want to read it again. I've been reading Kim Addonizio's new book and most of the poems have not connected with me, but one of them--Happiness Report--grabbed me immediately and I read it three times and will read it again today.
The suggestion that you should read a poem a third time to see if you agree with it makes no sense to me. Poetry is not a debate.
I read poetry every morning when I'm still waking up and still bleary-eyed. The poems are in the stack of books currently on my bedside table, and in emails I subscribe to (e.g, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day offerings).
I consider a collection of poems to be great if maybe 5 poems out of 75 connect with me. Most of my poetry books are only slightly dog-eared.
I first look for the poem's invitation for me to enter -- accessibility, humor, familiarity, whatever. Without that invitation to the reader I think the poet should just keep their work to themselves ... read it to the mirror in their bathroom. A poem, like any writing, is a form of communication and if the writer doesn't make a real effort to connect with a reader it's only masturbation.
The voice should be clear. If a poem feels like a puzzle I'll set it aside. I'd rather do the NYT crossword.
If the poem captures me on the first go-around, I'll read it aloud. If I still love it I'll share it with the few friends I have who are also poetry fans. I'll return to it often.
I generally love to have my emotions tickled, to see familiar things in an unfamiliar way, to trigger trains of thought that I haven't ridden before.
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND the book, HOW TO READ A POEM AND FALL IN LOVE WITH POETRY, by Edward Hirsch -- himself an excellent poet.
I love that you started with a confession that I share: I don't read as much poetry as I should either.
I have been trying to learn to read poetry better.
Here's what I've come up with so far:
- Have poet writing friends/critique partners. Watching a poem grow from the ground up, reading draft after draft, talking to a poet as they work through edits and word choice and learning their hows and whys helps understand the poem better and, then, other poems better.
- Read out loud.
- Listen to OTHER people reading it out loud.
- Talk about it. I rarely understand a poem by reading it. I frequently need to discuss, talk about, listen to other thoughts, etc before it really hits me.
- Listen to other people talking about it.
- Most importantly (for me): don't overdo. I think poems need room to breathe. I cannot imagine being a poetry submissions editor having to read a whole bunch of them at once! I can only do small volumes (maybe because I'm such a baby poetry reader and can't handle the volume/weight). A little bit goes a long way and something is better than nothing.
I often reread a poem, but there’s no strict rule I follow for rereading. Sometimes it’s the whole poem and other times it’s a single stanza/line. But when I do reread it’s usually because I want to savor the poet’s words, I want to give my all to experiencing the moment. I think when it comes to poetry, rereading is a must because the art form itself calls upon packing so much in so little words that I think it’s fun to reread and find something new each time. The only thing I really look for in poetry is truth telling and authenticity. I don’t have to connect with what the poet is experiencing to enjoy a poem. As long as it’s genuine, the poem is interesting. Though I will admit I do get excited when I see myself in a poem. It’s nice to feel less lonely, even if where I found myself is in a place that I’d never admit to being in. I also get excited by experimental technique. An unexpected metaphor, a fun rhyme, an odd image. Poetry to me is all about the unconventions of language and of life, so I want to be surprised. I want to read a line and instantly be filled with questions for the poet. Now how I experience poetry varies. Sometimes I need to hear it spoken aloud, either by myself or by the poet themselves. (I lean more towards the latter because each poet has their own way of stressing sounds and syllables). I’m not the biggest fan of poetry collections. Like I have mad respect anyone who produces one but as a reader I can’t sit down and read a collection in one sitting. I have to read a poem or two, digest it and then return to the collection later on. If a poem is really hitting me, I like to write a “response” to the poet. This response isn’t formal, it’s usually me writing my own poem focusing on a similar topic but with my own experiences. Like if I read a poem about mental health that really hit me, I’d write a poem about my own experience with mental health.
No wise one here, but your posts always make me want to be smarter, Becky. Thanks to Radha Marcum for comparing the many kinds of poetry to the many kinds and categories of fiction. And of course personal tastes and experience change over time. What speaks to us when we're fifteen might not move us at fifty-one -- but then again, it might! I take great comfort in the poems I memorized as a teenager and when I can't sleep, reciting them in my head never fails to lull me into slumber. Not because the poems are boring but because rhyme and rhythm are more enduring than the news of the day. A hopeful thought.
Many of the poems I read, read me in ways that are beyond my comprehension. And they talk to other poems and literature I've read, kind of like the authors' unconscious minds communicated with each other thru their writings, without their conscious minds even being aware it's happening. And I like to think my poems, the ones I write, like the ones I'm always in search of by others, are gently surreal, their leaps openings into a space where the reader and poem may interact and be changed, a place where consciousness and art may recognize one another as impermanent loves and glimpses of the Real may be encountered, though never quite remembered. Sometimes words can become artifacts more than signifiers toward particular meanings, and texture may interact with sound and emotion on levels where our artificial, individual identities no longer reach or oppress the freedoms we already possess but have forgotten along the way. I mean, aren't we really here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness, as Thich Nhat Hanh has said? And doesn't poetry, and all art, help facilitate this? Methinks it does.
I don't believe there's a certain amount of poetry anyone "should" read, unless we're still in school and need to complete our assignments. A fine poem, even a short one, is like a drop of ink in a glass of water - it changes the water from clear to colored. I like to enjoy that effect before reading more. As for the question about agreeing or disagreeing - I wish that weren't online! Someone has likely taken it seriously, resulting in yet another person out there who can't enjoy or appreciate poetry.
I highly recommend Matthew Zapruder's superb book "Why Poetry", about which Robert Hass says: "Zapruder on poetry is pure pleasure. His prose is so direct that you have the impression, sentence by sentence, that you are being told simple things about a simple subject and by the end of each essay [with trenchant examples from a wide variety of poets] you come to understand that you've been on a very rich, very subtle tour of what aesthetically and psychologically amazing about the art of poetry."
Zapruder makes the case that despite what junior-high and high school English teachers may have "taught", poetry is *not* an abstruse secret language which always needs to be decoded by some priviliged group of cognoscenti. Rather, the reader of poetry, by virtue of being a human being and a native speaker of one's own language, has exactly what is needed to encourage the mind to drift by association multi-dimensionally and avoid the linear trappings of what gets said on cable TV, blogs and podcasts.
i approach every poem with respect. When I begin to read a poem, I listen to the 'narrative', whether it is linear, looking back, or just looping. Sometimes, the visual takes over and I listen thru the visual, which I love. But, most important, I simply trust the poet and their poem, and go with it. when i have read a good poem (for me, my appreciation), i know it, and i read it again, sometimes 3x... and make a copy, so i can read it again, later..
The three-times-through advice is okay, I think. I’d have to see the exact wording, but maybe the point was just don’t read poetry like prose. With prose, particularly non-fiction, we tend to go for or agin the author as we read it. This can present a problem with poetry because it often takes multiple passes to make much sense of it.
I might say two times through is enough and reverse the order so the silent read is first, then aloud second, but as someone said above, if the first read doesn’t interest me (and hopefully it’s not because I’ve already taken against the author), then I usually don’t read it aloud.
With a poem that has stickiness, I’ll find myself coming back to it again and again. Then at some point will want to read it aloud to someone else (“Maybe I’m crazy, but is this as good as I think it is?”).
I suppose the unasked question is what’s meant by “poetry”? Stuff in little journals that have more subscribers than readers? What about pop song lyrics (already sung aloud, so that’s one problem solved)? What about musicals? Hamilton? (20,000+ words, using techniques that many contemporary poets have largely abandoned). If all these count, then perhaps we’re getting enough poetry in our diets.
I write poetry in search of the inside experience of a thing, or event. It's a spiritual practice. I love reading poetry out loud. When reading poetry out loud it should be like foreplay, slowly awakening the senses to that other realm, that sometimes secret realm, which reminds us of our connectivity, our divinity.It can all be done by contemplating on a single leaf.And when done well, that leaf becomes a profound teacher.
I'm maybe among the worst folks to comment on how to read a poem, because my own verse is always about ideas which engage the higher facilities, rather than putting them out to pasture to enjoy the qualities of things which shape imagination. But I have a thought verse from Old Wine and New New Wine which puts forth the idea of what an authentic poem is about, so please read it and then read how I've learned to read and enjoy authentic poems:
Poesy
The poet, I've learned,
is someone
who sponges up
a pallet of things
the world offers
from the infinitude of objects
language constructs in her mystery,
constructs alive
out of her living things,
not from her factory of categories.
She (the poet) has a nose for saying
the particular
in the way particular things reach out
to relationships with others.
So she makes a virtual particular thing
which beckons
more truly
than beckon many real things.
Magic!
So poems create a magic, virtual place that's somehow got something you love or need or fear or… but you can’t engage its life, except in reading or recalling the poem. When I find a poet I like, I buy a print copy of their poems. I've got a special time each day, a half hour or less, when I read one or two poems from one of the print copies, choosing the book randomly but reading the poems sequentially. I often go back and read a poem I've read weeks or months earlier, and often the "oldies" have a special glow that comes from recollections, like recalling shared memories with a friend. JBS Palmer
Really just my preference. I have found that too often the more obscure poems boil down to the poet merely saying, “Look how clever I am!” But yes, a few have twisted my mind in satisfying ways.
I began writing as a poet, the way a child might approach any endeavor, as naturally as one breathes, playfully without rules or shoulds or judgement calls. Though I rarely write poetry per se anymore, every word and phrase of my prose is infused with it, with lyricism, metaphor and, if all goes well, poignance. Where poems are concerned, there are no messages to be argued. Poetry is so much more than that. It penetrates the soul unimpeded much as music does, through a kind of emotional osmosis. I want a poem to grab me as music does, to catch me unawares, to pull me in, to engage me, to touch and provoke me, to offer me another (and another and another) vantage point or sense of something, and, by way of cadence, word and sound change me in some way.
Becky, this is another engaging post after your recent one asking for people to brag their lit mag. Thank you for fun, creative ways to get us in! So, I am moved to comment: I find poetry difficult to engage with, at first. It requires time. Often I don't give it the time it deserves but occasionally, as with the work of a friend who uses poetry, Torah and photography to create her medium, I let myself have the experience and enjoy it.
This post of mine may answer a slightly different question than the one you asked (more "how to enjoy a poem" rather than "how to read a poem,"), but it gives different simple approaches: https://poetryeveryone.substack.com/p/some-things-you-can-do-if-you-dont. I'll often use them with a poem I want to learn more about that doesn't make conventional sense, though they can be used with just about any poem.
Then there's the more academic "close reading" which I find helpful sometimes too: going slowly with pencil in hand, line by line, observing patterns, contradictions, questions that come up, trying to summarize in my own words. A metaphor I find helpful is to think of the poem as a room that I enter, and I slowly look around the room and take note of what's there. I gather broad impressions first and then start to investigate details: look under the chairs or take books off the shelf.
If I read or hear poem and an audible oh!, sigh, or other noise escapes from my lips, I read it over. The best ones hit me again on the second reading. It is a rare poem that can elicit that response after several readings with no response but I think it has happened.
Confession: I’m not a fan of poetry. I almost never read it. I’m not even sure I can tell good poetry from bad. And I’m speaking as someone with an advanced degree in English. Poetry has always seemed to me (with a few exceptions) a private language that is meaningful only to the poet. Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems, for example, are still puzzling readers 150 years later.
I read a poem hoping the words will land on my mind's ear the way good chocolate melts inside the warmth of my mouth. I can feel the rhythm and the trickle of sound carry from one line to another. Reading poetry is terrific cross training for us prose writers. It encourages brevity and a distillation of thoughts.
Nice post and great topic. As a nonfiction writer, I used to spend too much time trying to figure out what a poem meant. There had to be a "story" that I wasn't getting, I thought. A writer friend found it amusing when I told her how I struggled "to get" a poem. She gave me the following advice that opened the door to reading poetry for me. Read without expectation. Let the poem wash over you. Don't try to "work the poem" just let the poem happen. There is no right or wrong way to read it, experience the poem. I guess in some way that advice may sound intangible, less than concrete, but I think that's the point. Take hold of whatever speaks to you on the poem. It's an individual, personal experience.
My smart non-poet writer friends express a lot of bafflement around poetry. I reassure them — they don't have to find the poem's "meaning." Read or listen to poems for the sound, for the feeling, more like music. And don't feel bad if you don't like a poem. Just read the poems you like. There's no failing in that. There are so many categories of fiction. No one says you are a bad fiction reader if you don't happen to like historical novels or mysteries.
I try to read a poem twice, but I often don't unless there's something in the first reading that makes me want to read it again. I've been reading Kim Addonizio's new book and most of the poems have not connected with me, but one of them--Happiness Report--grabbed me immediately and I read it three times and will read it again today.
The suggestion that you should read a poem a third time to see if you agree with it makes no sense to me. Poetry is not a debate.
This is a great post and so strange that anyone would make that recommendation. I love your examples. 🤣🤣
I read poetry every morning when I'm still waking up and still bleary-eyed. The poems are in the stack of books currently on my bedside table, and in emails I subscribe to (e.g, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day offerings).
I consider a collection of poems to be great if maybe 5 poems out of 75 connect with me. Most of my poetry books are only slightly dog-eared.
I first look for the poem's invitation for me to enter -- accessibility, humor, familiarity, whatever. Without that invitation to the reader I think the poet should just keep their work to themselves ... read it to the mirror in their bathroom. A poem, like any writing, is a form of communication and if the writer doesn't make a real effort to connect with a reader it's only masturbation.
The voice should be clear. If a poem feels like a puzzle I'll set it aside. I'd rather do the NYT crossword.
If the poem captures me on the first go-around, I'll read it aloud. If I still love it I'll share it with the few friends I have who are also poetry fans. I'll return to it often.
I generally love to have my emotions tickled, to see familiar things in an unfamiliar way, to trigger trains of thought that I haven't ridden before.
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND the book, HOW TO READ A POEM AND FALL IN LOVE WITH POETRY, by Edward Hirsch -- himself an excellent poet.
Hi Becky. Just wanted you to know I laughed out loud at your fake responses to poets! ( nothing depends, etc) thank you!
I love that you started with a confession that I share: I don't read as much poetry as I should either.
I have been trying to learn to read poetry better.
Here's what I've come up with so far:
- Have poet writing friends/critique partners. Watching a poem grow from the ground up, reading draft after draft, talking to a poet as they work through edits and word choice and learning their hows and whys helps understand the poem better and, then, other poems better.
- Read out loud.
- Listen to OTHER people reading it out loud.
- Talk about it. I rarely understand a poem by reading it. I frequently need to discuss, talk about, listen to other thoughts, etc before it really hits me.
- Listen to other people talking about it.
- Most importantly (for me): don't overdo. I think poems need room to breathe. I cannot imagine being a poetry submissions editor having to read a whole bunch of them at once! I can only do small volumes (maybe because I'm such a baby poetry reader and can't handle the volume/weight). A little bit goes a long way and something is better than nothing.
I often reread a poem, but there’s no strict rule I follow for rereading. Sometimes it’s the whole poem and other times it’s a single stanza/line. But when I do reread it’s usually because I want to savor the poet’s words, I want to give my all to experiencing the moment. I think when it comes to poetry, rereading is a must because the art form itself calls upon packing so much in so little words that I think it’s fun to reread and find something new each time. The only thing I really look for in poetry is truth telling and authenticity. I don’t have to connect with what the poet is experiencing to enjoy a poem. As long as it’s genuine, the poem is interesting. Though I will admit I do get excited when I see myself in a poem. It’s nice to feel less lonely, even if where I found myself is in a place that I’d never admit to being in. I also get excited by experimental technique. An unexpected metaphor, a fun rhyme, an odd image. Poetry to me is all about the unconventions of language and of life, so I want to be surprised. I want to read a line and instantly be filled with questions for the poet. Now how I experience poetry varies. Sometimes I need to hear it spoken aloud, either by myself or by the poet themselves. (I lean more towards the latter because each poet has their own way of stressing sounds and syllables). I’m not the biggest fan of poetry collections. Like I have mad respect anyone who produces one but as a reader I can’t sit down and read a collection in one sitting. I have to read a poem or two, digest it and then return to the collection later on. If a poem is really hitting me, I like to write a “response” to the poet. This response isn’t formal, it’s usually me writing my own poem focusing on a similar topic but with my own experiences. Like if I read a poem about mental health that really hit me, I’d write a poem about my own experience with mental health.
Love the lettuce discuss meme. Has a nice assonance and consonance to it.
No wise one here, but your posts always make me want to be smarter, Becky. Thanks to Radha Marcum for comparing the many kinds of poetry to the many kinds and categories of fiction. And of course personal tastes and experience change over time. What speaks to us when we're fifteen might not move us at fifty-one -- but then again, it might! I take great comfort in the poems I memorized as a teenager and when I can't sleep, reciting them in my head never fails to lull me into slumber. Not because the poems are boring but because rhyme and rhythm are more enduring than the news of the day. A hopeful thought.
Many of the poems I read, read me in ways that are beyond my comprehension. And they talk to other poems and literature I've read, kind of like the authors' unconscious minds communicated with each other thru their writings, without their conscious minds even being aware it's happening. And I like to think my poems, the ones I write, like the ones I'm always in search of by others, are gently surreal, their leaps openings into a space where the reader and poem may interact and be changed, a place where consciousness and art may recognize one another as impermanent loves and glimpses of the Real may be encountered, though never quite remembered. Sometimes words can become artifacts more than signifiers toward particular meanings, and texture may interact with sound and emotion on levels where our artificial, individual identities no longer reach or oppress the freedoms we already possess but have forgotten along the way. I mean, aren't we really here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness, as Thich Nhat Hanh has said? And doesn't poetry, and all art, help facilitate this? Methinks it does.
I don't believe there's a certain amount of poetry anyone "should" read, unless we're still in school and need to complete our assignments. A fine poem, even a short one, is like a drop of ink in a glass of water - it changes the water from clear to colored. I like to enjoy that effect before reading more. As for the question about agreeing or disagreeing - I wish that weren't online! Someone has likely taken it seriously, resulting in yet another person out there who can't enjoy or appreciate poetry.
I highly recommend Matthew Zapruder's superb book "Why Poetry", about which Robert Hass says: "Zapruder on poetry is pure pleasure. His prose is so direct that you have the impression, sentence by sentence, that you are being told simple things about a simple subject and by the end of each essay [with trenchant examples from a wide variety of poets] you come to understand that you've been on a very rich, very subtle tour of what aesthetically and psychologically amazing about the art of poetry."
Zapruder makes the case that despite what junior-high and high school English teachers may have "taught", poetry is *not* an abstruse secret language which always needs to be decoded by some priviliged group of cognoscenti. Rather, the reader of poetry, by virtue of being a human being and a native speaker of one's own language, has exactly what is needed to encourage the mind to drift by association multi-dimensionally and avoid the linear trappings of what gets said on cable TV, blogs and podcasts.
Magnificent and worthwhile!
i approach every poem with respect. When I begin to read a poem, I listen to the 'narrative', whether it is linear, looking back, or just looping. Sometimes, the visual takes over and I listen thru the visual, which I love. But, most important, I simply trust the poet and their poem, and go with it. when i have read a good poem (for me, my appreciation), i know it, and i read it again, sometimes 3x... and make a copy, so i can read it again, later..
The three-times-through advice is okay, I think. I’d have to see the exact wording, but maybe the point was just don’t read poetry like prose. With prose, particularly non-fiction, we tend to go for or agin the author as we read it. This can present a problem with poetry because it often takes multiple passes to make much sense of it.
I might say two times through is enough and reverse the order so the silent read is first, then aloud second, but as someone said above, if the first read doesn’t interest me (and hopefully it’s not because I’ve already taken against the author), then I usually don’t read it aloud.
With a poem that has stickiness, I’ll find myself coming back to it again and again. Then at some point will want to read it aloud to someone else (“Maybe I’m crazy, but is this as good as I think it is?”).
I suppose the unasked question is what’s meant by “poetry”? Stuff in little journals that have more subscribers than readers? What about pop song lyrics (already sung aloud, so that’s one problem solved)? What about musicals? Hamilton? (20,000+ words, using techniques that many contemporary poets have largely abandoned). If all these count, then perhaps we’re getting enough poetry in our diets.
I write poetry in search of the inside experience of a thing, or event. It's a spiritual practice. I love reading poetry out loud. When reading poetry out loud it should be like foreplay, slowly awakening the senses to that other realm, that sometimes secret realm, which reminds us of our connectivity, our divinity.It can all be done by contemplating on a single leaf.And when done well, that leaf becomes a profound teacher.
I'm maybe among the worst folks to comment on how to read a poem, because my own verse is always about ideas which engage the higher facilities, rather than putting them out to pasture to enjoy the qualities of things which shape imagination. But I have a thought verse from Old Wine and New New Wine which puts forth the idea of what an authentic poem is about, so please read it and then read how I've learned to read and enjoy authentic poems:
Poesy
The poet, I've learned,
is someone
who sponges up
a pallet of things
the world offers
from the infinitude of objects
language constructs in her mystery,
constructs alive
out of her living things,
not from her factory of categories.
She (the poet) has a nose for saying
the particular
in the way particular things reach out
to relationships with others.
So she makes a virtual particular thing
which beckons
more truly
than beckon many real things.
Magic!
So poems create a magic, virtual place that's somehow got something you love or need or fear or… but you can’t engage its life, except in reading or recalling the poem. When I find a poet I like, I buy a print copy of their poems. I've got a special time each day, a half hour or less, when I read one or two poems from one of the print copies, choosing the book randomly but reading the poems sequentially. I often go back and read a poem I've read weeks or months earlier, and often the "oldies" have a special glow that comes from recollections, like recalling shared memories with a friend. JBS Palmer
Really just my preference. I have found that too often the more obscure poems boil down to the poet merely saying, “Look how clever I am!” But yes, a few have twisted my mind in satisfying ways.
I began writing as a poet, the way a child might approach any endeavor, as naturally as one breathes, playfully without rules or shoulds or judgement calls. Though I rarely write poetry per se anymore, every word and phrase of my prose is infused with it, with lyricism, metaphor and, if all goes well, poignance. Where poems are concerned, there are no messages to be argued. Poetry is so much more than that. It penetrates the soul unimpeded much as music does, through a kind of emotional osmosis. I want a poem to grab me as music does, to catch me unawares, to pull me in, to engage me, to touch and provoke me, to offer me another (and another and another) vantage point or sense of something, and, by way of cadence, word and sound change me in some way.
Becky, this is another engaging post after your recent one asking for people to brag their lit mag. Thank you for fun, creative ways to get us in! So, I am moved to comment: I find poetry difficult to engage with, at first. It requires time. Often I don't give it the time it deserves but occasionally, as with the work of a friend who uses poetry, Torah and photography to create her medium, I let myself have the experience and enjoy it.
Liked your comments on lines from well known pomes (as Joyce would have it); droll. 😎
This post of mine may answer a slightly different question than the one you asked (more "how to enjoy a poem" rather than "how to read a poem,"), but it gives different simple approaches: https://poetryeveryone.substack.com/p/some-things-you-can-do-if-you-dont. I'll often use them with a poem I want to learn more about that doesn't make conventional sense, though they can be used with just about any poem.
Then there's the more academic "close reading" which I find helpful sometimes too: going slowly with pencil in hand, line by line, observing patterns, contradictions, questions that come up, trying to summarize in my own words. A metaphor I find helpful is to think of the poem as a room that I enter, and I slowly look around the room and take note of what's there. I gather broad impressions first and then start to investigate details: look under the chairs or take books off the shelf.
Hope that helps!
If I read or hear poem and an audible oh!, sigh, or other noise escapes from my lips, I read it over. The best ones hit me again on the second reading. It is a rare poem that can elicit that response after several readings with no response but I think it has happened.
Confession: I’m not a fan of poetry. I almost never read it. I’m not even sure I can tell good poetry from bad. And I’m speaking as someone with an advanced degree in English. Poetry has always seemed to me (with a few exceptions) a private language that is meaningful only to the poet. Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems, for example, are still puzzling readers 150 years later.
I read a poem hoping the words will land on my mind's ear the way good chocolate melts inside the warmth of my mouth. I can feel the rhythm and the trickle of sound carry from one line to another. Reading poetry is terrific cross training for us prose writers. It encourages brevity and a distillation of thoughts.